Nuruddin Farah - Knots

Cambara rings off, her unbounded sense of exhilaration spreading to the point of affecting her so deeply that she is almost tearful. She decides no one can touch Kiin for out-and-out kindness shown without obvious ulterior impulse. Civil wars or not, there are people like Kiin who are by nature generous to a fault, well meaning, and excessively munificent. In contrast to the uncharitable Zaak, who is her cousin, her former “spouse,” and her current host, Kiin has taken to seeing to all of Cambara’s immediate needs despite the fact that they are not blood relations. Cambara thinks that this goes to prove that not every Somali is obsessed with the idea of clan affiliation and that many people behave normally even if the conditions in which they operate are themselves abnormal.

Cambara’s display of marked, positive attitude toward Kiin’s generosity is short lived when she starts to sorrow over the general state of decay in the compound opposite the hotels. The unsightly scene before her pulls her up for further grief. She stands directly behind the window, looking out and surveying a wasteland of heartbreaking ugliness: trees that have not grown to their natural height, scraps of wood and metal thrown any which way, children rifling in the arid waste all around, as though in search of something precious that they can sell. The fact that she sees adult men squatting and defecating in full view of the road, which is about fifty meters to their back, troubles her no end. Then her wandering gaze dwells for a few moments on a man wielding an ax and turning a huge metal pipe of industrial size into fragments, chopping it into cartable portions. She reckons that men giving themselves in to insatiable greed employed similar destructive methods first to dismantle the national monuments and then to break them up into bits before selling them off dirt-cheap in the one of the Gulf states.

It is when she turns away from the desolation outside and reenters the bathroom that she is impressed with how clean its floor is. She even forgets about all her other disconsolate impressions for a minute, and her eyes shine forth with radiance. Finally, she removes her boots and then takes off her clothes, item by item, dropping them on the floor and trampling on them, the way her son used to do whenever he was in a mood to try his father, Wardi’s, patience. How Wardi would go berserk, ready to hit the boy for his obduracy. Cambara, in maternal circumspection for her son’s well-being, would intervene, picking up the offending items herself from where her son dropped them and telling Wardi: “I want you to take it easy. And please let peace reign in this house.” Remembering the turf wars fought over the raising of her only son, whom she failed, as she could not safeguard him from Wardi’s filicidal tendencies, she is unable to keep her rage in check. She wishes that she had acted like a hen, clucking away in watchful frenzy over her chicks, shielding them from harm.

She is so full of rage that she takes a huge karate kick at the door. Fortunately, she doesn’t break it in two. But that doesn’t stop her from letting go a scream so ungodly that running feet come and someone taps gently on the door to ask after a decent interval if everything is okay with madam.

“Everything is fine, thank you,” she says.

Then she sinks into a crouch, her fists balled into a fist, her teeth clenched, and her whole body in a tremor as if she is fortifying herself for a final showdown with her inner demons.

When her desperate attempt to calm her nerves leads her to mutter self-recriminations of the remonstrative kind, in which she blames Wardi for her own shortcomings, the activated part of her mind pulls itself back in the rational belief that this is self-destructive. Has she not come to Mogadiscio in hope of chancing upon a noble way of mourning her loss, not in anger but while recovering the family property to devote herself to the service of peace?

Then for the first time since her arrival in Mogadiscio, Cambara delights in walking barefoot in a bathroom, eyes closed, and her hands joyously caressing her naked body in the tactile appreciation of a blind bathing.

She considers taking a room at Maanta as a test of her commitment to making her own way toward her independence from Zaak. It is also to provide her with proof, if there be a need to show some, that, as a mistress of her actions, she is not beholden to someone else, not least of all to a man, be it Zaak or Wardi. She will most likely keep certain aspects of her life private and will treat the room as her hush-hush retreat, rather like the way one keeps an affair secret. It amuses her now that she never had the temptation to have a love affair in all the years that she was married sadly and miserably to Wardi.

Cambara comes out of her rooms after a hot shower, her first. She feels refreshed, with a younger spring in her step, as she bounces downstairs, past the cubicle that serves as the reception of the hotel wing, where the deputy manager of the hotel sits, reading. She assumes that Mohammed is reading a textbook, because he is underlining paragraphs of the text with a marker, very bright yellow. He is also mumbling something to himself the way semi-literates recite the letters of the alphabet when they have just mastered it. She nods her head to him in welcome acknowledgment of his warm grin.

Coming out into the sun, she goes up a couple of stone steps and, to avoid colliding with a small structure built around the well, which suddenly juts out, she turns a sharp left. Finally, she sees a woman at the farthest corner and then spots the woman’s arms flailing in a manner suggestive more of someone drowning than of somebody waving. When she gets closer, she recognizes Kiin, who has a huge smile framing her face. Cambara moves speedily toward the restaurant-café, where Kiin is now at a table all on her own. The café part of the restaurant, which has a straw roof, is still under construction, supported by heavy beams on one side and metal scaffolding on the other.

Kiin is up on her feet by the time Cambara joins her table, her arms opening widely in an embrace. The two women hug and then kiss each other on both cheeks, like two childhood friends meeting for the first time in years, especially now that they are adult women, to share their fond memories of a long-forgotten era. Finally, Cambara sits in the chair diagonal to Kiin’s, their knees touching, their emotionally charged closeness in so brief a time starting to worry Cambara. Even so, a tingling sensation in the entirety of her body makes Cambara recall her teens, when she first felt the ending of her innocent girlhood soon after becoming conscious of the evident changes in her and remarking on the fact that boys and men were looking purposefully at her. A memory of being alone in the bathroom, naked, and touching her budding breasts comes back to her. So do two other incidents: one about her first encounter with Zaak having an erection and the other about her own encounter with a peacock. She remembers how catching sight of the peacock aroused her sexually. She feels Kiin’s closeness has nothing of a come-on to it. If anything, it is that of a woman who has lived a cloistered life showing her appreciation of an innocent friendship that will mean a great deal to her.

Kiin now takes hold of Cambara’s hand and, kneading it and turning it this and that way, asks her, “How do you like your rooms?”

“I love them.”

Cambara makes a conscious effort to avoid looking into Kiin’s eyes, which are boring into hers at the same time as she tries to retrieve her hand, which is now lost to Kiin’s tight grip.

“Lunch?” Kiin asks.

“I am starving.”

“What would you like to have?”

“What’s there to eat?”

Kiin summons the waiter, a short, very dark handsome man in his late twenties with thinning hair and a very beautiful smile. He approaches, and then, after being instructed to tell the honored guest what there is to have, the waiter recites the menu, deferentially addressing himself to Cambara, who, at first, has difficulty concentrating, because he is speaking very fast. After he has repeated itemizing the menu, Cambara places her order: salad, no first course, a dish of fish, sole, with a touch of garlic and plenty of lemon, fruit for dessert, coffee. When the waiter tells her that the espresso machine is not working, she asks for tea. Not sure whether Kiin has already put in her order of food and is waiting for it to arrive or whether she will eat elsewhere, Cambara looks from the waiter to Kiin, who nods to him, indicating that he is to go get Cambara her meal.