Nuruddin Farah - Knots

It takes the driver several attempts to reverse the vehicle out of a tight spot. He wheels the pre-power-steering model forward and then backward, his gear-changing polished, professional, and fast. However, when the two young escorts share a private joke, burst into laughter, and begin to roll in their seats in stitches, the driver loses his composure, braking just in time before crashing into a tree and then halting crudely before the front of the vehicle collides with the wall to his back. Unspeaking, the plumber is contemplative.

After the vehicle has exited and then eventually picked up moderate speed, heading north, and it hits one of the main subsidiary roads, Cambara prepares to give the driver several leads to help him get them to Zaak’s place. Just then, she observes the driver’s sudden loss of poise, which does not make sense to her until one of the armed escorts talks of his and the driver’s last visit to the northern neighborhoods of the city. In his account, the young man tells her that the visit dates back to a decade ago when he and the driver participated in some of the fiercest skirmishes between former warlords StrongmanNorth and StrongmanSouth.

To keep panic from setting in, Cambara asks the driver questions, all the while struggling not to lose her sangfroid and doing her best to sound convincing and appear unruffled.

“On whose side did you and the driver fight?” she says and then looks away, almost trembling with judicious displeasure.

“We fought alongside StrongmanSouth’s clansmen, who were allied with ours,” replies one of the armed escorts in the back.

When her attempt to will herself into listening to the conversation without making comments proves unsuccessful and she settles on pandering to her curiosity, Cambara creases her features to display her displeasure with this stance. Then she sees herself as a woman with little knowledge of this thing everyone calls “the clan business,” the unruliness of whose politics has brought the nation to ruin. That she is sharing the confined space of a vehicle with four men, three of whom have blood on their hands, makes her question the credentials of people like Kiin, who employ them. She wonders if she will rue her short-sightedness, if she will regret the fact that she has accepted Kiin’s kind offer to lend her a car, a driver, and armed escort; call up a plumber, whom she uses herself; and help her to achieve her aims, whatever these are, since she has not insisted that Cambara tell her. But she thinks she doesn’t want to go there, because in a civil war no one is innocent: men, women, youths, clerics, everyone is an accomplice in the killing and maiming of others, known and unknown. As the motorcar hurtles forward, she turns to the driver and asks him what his profession used to be before the country’s collapse.

“I joined the National Army, now defunct, before taking my secondary-school finals and was sent away to the then Soviet Union on a scholarship to Odessa, where I trained as a tank engineer,” he replies.

Cambara asks the driver, “Do you happen to remember where you were or rather what you were doing when Siyad Barre, the tyrant, fled the city in an army tank?”

“I was one of the few senior-ranking army officers who refused to join the militia that was out to take Mogadiscio, because it was there for the taking,” the driver responds. “We learned soon enough, and especially after the dictator had fled and the presidential palace had fallen into the hands of the nativists, those of us fighting to live up to the ideals of the National Army formed a very small minority, but we were fighting a losing battle.”

“So what did you do?”

“Together with a couple of like-minded military officers,” the driver answers, “I set up a small unit numbering a dozen or so men and representing the clan spectrum of this country. We raised the unit with a view to protecting the members of the clan families of the ‘chased-outs,’ people whose properties had been rendered fair game — taken over, looted — and whose current occupants placed under constant menace, a scenario of ‘You leave, or else the massacre!’ Many departed against their will, becoming displaced or going to refugee camps in one or the other of the neighboring countries.”

“What has become of your unit?”

“You are looking at the remnant of the unit.”

The plumber speaks for the first time, saying, “Take seven, you have a mere three.”

Cambara falls silent. In her vigorous attempt to concentrate, as though fearing that the hour of her failure is at hand, she furrows her forehead, her features a tangled affair. Of course she is sad to admit that a similar fate might be waiting to ambush her honorable intentions. Cambara will agree, if asked, that it is virtually impossible to live up to one’s high ideals in these adverse conditions, but she prays that her effort will not falter or ultimately come to naught. For she plans to construct a counterlife dependent on a few individuals, namely Kiin, maybe Bile and Dajaal, whom she has cast in the likeness of reliable allies.

When the driver parks the vehicle in front of Zaak’s house without needing further guidance, Cambara draws a breath, relaxing, and she looks as if someone has pulled her away from a disturbing view. Both of the armed escorts alight, one of them opening the gate, the other readying for any contingency, including a shootout. The driver looks this way and that before easing his foot off the brake and then engaging the gear. He stops under the shade of a tree, away from the prying eyes of prowlers who might casually spot the car.

Cambara leads the plumber into the house and shows him everything he needs to see: the kitchen, the toilets, the downstairs and the upstairs bathrooms. As he bones up on the overall situation, studying the source of the water, the pipes that have gone rusty, those that are in disrepair, and starts to scribble copious notes, she takes leave of him, suggesting they meet at the car.

Then she goes up to her room to pack two large suitcases. She fills one of them with several items of everyday clothing plus a couple of dresses for special occasions and five thousand U.S. dollars, a quarter of the money she has brought along, in cash. She stuffs the harder of the two large suitcases with books about puppetry, masks, and theater, several of them the size of coffee tables. She opens one, then takes a look at her sketches, her notes, and other relevant material that she has brought along to help her one day produce her play, a pet project at which she has been working on and off for several years, even if on the quiet. When she comes to making a choice of what to wear, she changes her mind several times and tries on different garments, mixing and matching styles before finally settling on a comfortably loose, cotton shirt and baggy trousers. She feels she can afford to do away with the veil and headwear altogether, and combs her hair, letting it down, as if reliving her young days in Mogadiscio. For effect, she wears a garbasaar shawl of the finest silk.

She decides not to ask any of the youths to help her bring down the suitcases to the vehicle and hauls it all on her own. The plumber, who is about to wrap up his note-taking and cross-checking, hears the footfalls of somebody shifting, half pulling, and half heaving a hefty suitcase with wheels down a staircase. It is only after he takes a second and a more concentrated look at the figure humping down the weighty object that he realizes that he is staring at Cambara, who has on a stylish outfit. Amazed at the mutation, he softens the impact on his mind by offering to cart it himself to the truck, only to discover that he cannot even lift it off the ground, let alone drag it the way she has been doing. Then, as if to prove a point, Cambara humps it all by herself all the way to the vehicle, while the plumber goes back into the house to retrieve his tools, measurements, and sketches. She takes notice of the armed escorts amusedly looking from her to the plumber and then calls to the driver to request that he open the boot for her, please.