Nuruddin Farah - Knots

“Tell me,” she says.

Readying to answer her command, he does his best to replace what someone might describe as ragamuffin behavior with a kind of deportment that can win someone like Cambara over. He sits down, unbidden.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“Depends.”

Cambara flinches from the hostile thought that has presented itself to her, a not-so-friendly go-hang-yourself catchphrase, the kind of braggadocio his answer deserves. On second thought, she does nothing of the sort, in part because he reminds her of Dalmar, who kept the motif of dialog in vibrant relief long after the exchange had lost its flair. She relives the fury with which Wardi often greeted Dalmar’s back-talk bravado and how he threatened him with violence if the boy did not stop provoking him. She recalls advising Wardi to desist from browbeating Dalmar into becoming a different child and saying “You might as well instruct a bird not to sing as tell Dalmar not to back talk.”

Another reason why she indulges Gacal’s boldness is related to the fact that he is clearly as capable of resisting adult pressure, especially when someone bludgeons him into toeing the line, as he is of accommodating himself to an acquiescent mood, if he puts his mind to it.

Her smile as thin as a new run in an old pair of stockings, she decides to break his resistance by giving him the bare bones of her own story, with special emphasis on her loss of a son more or less his age, whose death she is now mourning. When she is done with the telling, a very sad memory darkens Gacal’s expression. He is silent for a long time, looking grave. Then he speaks.

Gacal speaks with an elegiac touch to express the unimaginable tragedy that has been his young life. He tells of an equally great loss: the murder of his father, with whom he came to Mogadiscio two years earlier. Killed by the militiamen who had abducted the two of them, kept them apart and incommunicado, his father was shot in the head and robbed of his cash before they let Gacal go. As he talks, Cambara gapes at him in shock, observing how adult he sounds as he pauses occasionally for a phrase that is eluding him or searches for the words with which to describe his grief. She notices too that he has the habit of turning his face away slightly either to the left or right in the manner of somebody striking a pose. He sits, pricking up his ears, as though listening for danger in one menacing form or other to walk in and at one single move end the world that he has known. His story is very difficult to put together, since much of it does not make sense. A man leaves America and brings along his son to expose him to the language and culture of his people on the advice of his wife, the boy’s mother, who wants them away so she can finish some project. Armed militiamen seize the two soon after they have landed at one of the city’s warlord-run airports and entered a vehicle marked “Taxi.” That much is believable. It is when Gacal tells the other part of his story in America that Cambara starts to wonder if this is truth or fiction.

Gacal says, “I was born in Duluth to Somali parents who were granted resettlement rights in the United States after having lived in refugee camps in Kenya for several years. After their first stop in San Diego, they relocated to Minnesota.”

Cambara takes note of his adult register: the tone of voice, choice of words, and body language too. The only part of him that matches his chronological age is his nose, wet like a kitten’s. Because his eyes keep straying impishly, she can’t date them with precision. “I’ve been able to unravel the mess that my life has become only lately,” he continues in an adult voice of a more philosophical register, “almost two years since I got here with my father.”

“Where is your mother?”

“Back in the States.”

“In Duluth?”

“I have no idea.”

“You’ve called her, haven’t you?”

“Our home phone number has been disconnected.”

She can’t bring herself to envisage being in his position, without imagining as though his horror were hers. She senses this is beyond her, because she doesn’t know enough about him. She is aware that civil wars have separated many families from one another, husbands from wives, children from their parents. In the case of Somalia, she knows about the efforts of the International Red Cross to help unite some of the separated families and about the BBC Somali Service’s “Missing Persons” program, broadcast almost daily, with people giving the names of their missing ones, when and where they were last seen, and providing their own whereabouts and telephone numbers in the hope of hearing from them. Maybe she can get him into the program?

“Have you tried your friends at school or relatives, if you can remember their phone numbers?” She feels foolish the moment the words have left her lips. How can he phone if he doesn’t know a soul and doesn’t have the wherewithal to make the call?

“I have.”

A lump in Cambara’s throat prevents her from speaking and asking an indiscreet question, which for a long while lays siege to her tongue too. Despite this, she puts it to him. “How did you get the money to pay for the call?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I do. Otherwise I wouldn’t ask.”

“Frisked the pockets of a corpse and stole it.”

His answer so unsettles her that the jolt brings her back to the civil war realities. But despite that rude awakening, Cambara asks, “Were you successful in tracking down anyone?”

“All my attempts to do so have failed.”

Silent, he narrows his eyes, as if concentrating on an as-yet-unformed thought in the far distance. For all Cambara can tell, he is revisiting a scene from the past and perhaps thinking about how his present predicament is forcing him to bare himself before a strange woman in Mogadiscio.

She wants to know but dares not ask why he and his father have done away with the woman who bore him, because a son his age without a mother in the wings is unheard-of, an anomaly. She fidgets in her seat, preparing to speak. She can’t imagine the woman being written off, as if redundant. She thinks that parents need to be needed, mothers above all. She starts to say, “Your mother…!” and then trails off.

Gacal says, “We weren’t supposed to come here.”

Cambara feels the sort of helplessness that people feel when they are confronted with a problem about which they can do nothing. When she looks in his direction, he seems impervious to her twinge. It is as if he is saying “No pitying please.”

“Where is your mother in your story?”

Cambara interprets what Gacal tells her in an adult language Gacal is incapable of improvising. She understands that his father came to Nairobi as a private consultant, hired to set up IT companies in East Africa and to make them profitable. The two of them being inseparable, he brought along his son, as their visit coincided with the long summer holidays. It was his mother’s idea that Gacal benefit from living in a place safer than Mogadiscio and far more citylike than any other metropolis on the Somali peninsula, so he could learn Somali. While her husband and son were gone, the mother intended to lock herself away in order to complete some requirement or other from a university in another state where she must have been registered for an advanced degree.

“Did they quarrel often, your parents?”

“They were too busy for that, both working and happy in their jobs,” he says. “I was their only child, and they were pleased. They said that often, to me, or to others within my hearing.”

“Your father traveled a lot?”

“He did, and she looked after me.”

“Did he let her know you were coming here?”

“I doubt that he did.”