Nuruddin Farah - Knots

To advance her commitment to recruiting some of the youths and to promote the idea of peace, she hopes to give them a start in normal life. She will buy SilkHair, who is young enough to go to school, all the exercise and drawing books that he will need to register at one or another school as a remedial pupil. Then she trips up, losing her balance and catching herself in time before falling. As she tries to steady herself and regain her composure, her eyes fall on a clutch of men gathered at the bend in the dusty road just before the shopping complex. The men are staring; they have daggers for eyes, one of them managing to pierce through to the start of a weakening resolve. She stiffens her determination against the oncoming mugging, and the men seem to sense it, backing off as she approaches.

Odeywaa, the shopkeeper, finds her a taxi, which she takes not to Hotel Maanta, her destination, but — as a decoy — again to Hotel Shamac. There, the deputy manager receives her effusively, leads her to his air-conditioned office, and plies her with refreshments. He rings Kiin to alert her of Cambara’s arrival, and learns that Kiin is expecting her.

The deputy manager says to Cambara, “My driver will take you to Hotel Maanta, where a message from Kiin is awaiting your arrival.”

A few minutes later, the driver of the vehicle the deputy manager of Shamac has lent her is pressing the horn of the air-conditioned saloon car. Two sentries in blue uniform open the gate of Hotel Maanta, and, on making out the man at the wheel, they rise, as if in unison and in welcome recognition of him, greeting him with voluble chattiness. Cambara alights from the vehicle to find a thickset man in a white long-sleeved shirt, beige trousers, and black dress shoes moving in her direction, having taken the steps two at a time, nearly falling. He extends his hand, a smile spreading across his broad face, and comes toward her with the resolute intention of not permitting the guards to outdo him when it comes to receiving an honored client. Cambara surveys the scene ahead of her, favoring it with a cursory scrutiny, deciding that she likes what she has seen so far and is sure to fall in love with it the longer she is here. Moreover, she wants to be indebted to Kiin, to become friends with her, to receive good counsel from her; she wants Kiin to acquaint her with aspects of Mogadiscio that Cambara has not yet encountered. She looks forward to Kiin introducing her to the other women of whom Raxma has spoken, legions of women who are peace activists. Turning around, Cambara waves to the driver, who is maneuvering the vehicle out of a narrow space with consummate ease and leaving, while she mouths “Thanks” and he waves in acknowledgment.

Beaming from cheek to chin, the large man introduces himself. “My name is Mohammed. I am an assistant to Kiin, the manager, and I have a message for you.”

“What’s the message?”

Mohammed puts his hand in his trouser pockets only to bring it out empty and then study it as if it might reveal a mystery to him. Then he inserts it in the other pocket, rooting in it, with Cambara waiting for him all the while, thinking he may bring out a piece of paper with a message scribbled on it. She is anxious, patient. In a moment, despite her expectation, he is looking at a key and, for some reason that is unclear to her, appears first mystified, then despondent. He hangs his head to one side, like a boatswain whose vessel has mysteriously gone adrift. Mohammed offers the key to her, saying, “Here.”

Cambara takes it with both hands, muttering her thanks, which to her sound a little fake, and averting her eyes, because there is something she does not understand. She stares at the key for a long while, amused. In her head, Cambara replaces the word “message” with “key,” but this will not do. Rather than ask what to do with the key or to identify which room it is meant for, given that there is no number stamped on it and nothing to indicate what it may open, she asks, “And the message?”

Mohammed makes the laborious effort of someone struggling hard to mask a speech impediment. He speaks, pausing between every two or so words. Cambara strains to string the words together herself to make sense of them. “Kiin has said to give you a key to the room that she has reserved for you.”

Cambara turns the proffered key this and that way. The wind in the trees, the sweetness of their shade, the fact that the air here is fresh and no cigarette odor is riding the breeze: these, she hopes, will help her spend a very pleasant time at the hotel and make her stay in it an abiding joy. Overwhelmed with a sense of elation, and, unnerved, because everything is working out beyond her expectation, she loses her focus for a moment and then her physical equilibrium. Her gaze unfocused, she looks farther into the undefined distance, and as she does so, places her left foot behind her right, with the big toe of her left foot pushing against the right heel until she feels excruciating pain; then steadies herself.

She asks Mohammed to lead her to her room and follows him not too closely as she conjures up images of her workaday situations during her stay at Hotel Maanta. After she ascends a flight of stairs down by the well to her left, her body cells register the proximity of water. The generator is on and providing electricity. She feels the earth under her feet tremble and prays that her room is farthest away from this ungodly din.

“Is the generator on all day and all night?”

“It’s not on when we can tap into an ice factory in the proximity,” replies Mohammed. “We turn it on whenever the owners of the factory are load shedding, and they do this without prior notice.”

She remembers in the days when power was supplied by the municipality of the city and cost almost nothing, and no one ever heard of load shedding. Realizing that she is lagging a few paces behind Mohammed, she catches up with him, and they walk up another flight of stairs, down an asphalted lane, with trees and shrubs on either side of it, through a metal door, up the stairway to the first floor, and along the corridor.

Finally, Mohammed comes to a shuffling halt and points out the metal door with no number on it to her. She inserts the key in the lock somewhat tentatively and after several attempts, turns it with resolute thrust. She thanks him again and lets herself in, securing the door behind her with a bolt.

The two-room setup — neat, decent-sized, boasting two beds, both pushed against a wall — faces away from the two generators, one of which is on now, maybe because the minimal daytime supply of power provided by the privately run electricity company is off. That the air conditioner is on and that she can barely hear the noise of the generator assures her further that she will like it here.

Moving about the two rooms to explore the extent of their combined spaciousness, Cambara paces out the distance between the rooms and then the two beds, and then concentrates on measuring out their relative nearness to the bathroom. Like a spoiled child making a choice by going meeni-mano, now pointing at one bed and now at the other, she settles eventually on the bed on the right side in the belief that she will enjoy sleeping in it more. She stretches herself on it, testing how comfortable lying on it will be. Then she pulls open one cupboard after another until she discovers, discreetly worked into one wall, a safe, with instructions in Somali, Arabic, Italian, and English. Cambara is agreeably surprised to find, when she pulls the handle toward herself, intending to set the combination number of the safe to one she will remember, that her luck is favoring her with a good smile. This is because there is a Post-it note from Kiin informing Cambara that she has left a mobile phone under the mattress of the bed to the right-hand side of the room and asking her to “please ring her up” to let her know that all is well. She does as Kiin suggests, pressing the Menu button and speaking right away to her kind host. Then Kiin tells her that she has also arranged for a plumber to see Cambara in an hour or so and asks her to wait until he arrives, then take him and show him the jobs she wants done. Mohammed, on Cambara’s say-so, will be only too glad to organize a vehicle and bodyguards for her.