Nuruddin Farah - Knots

When Cambara is all packed and ready to go, Zaak shows unmatched eagerness to make amends to her before the truck leaves; but she can’t be bothered. She says “Let’s go” to the driver, then calls to Zaak’s youths, among whom she distributes wads of local currency as baksheesh, and heads in the direction of the truck. Someone is keeping a door open, hand extended ready to help if need be.

Then she turns round to have a quiet word with SilkHair, who is standing close by. She hugs him to herself and then looks into his eyes, their noses almost touching. Her voice low so no one can hear it, she asks, “What about you, SilkHair?”

“What about me?” he says.

“Would you like to come with me, in the truck?”

When, to her delightful surprise, SilkHair announces publicly that he would like to try his luck with her, she is at a loss for words, even though this is what she has been wanting all along. She hugs him and, taking hold of his thin wrist, urges him to get into the truck ahead of her, which he does.

She says to Zaak, “I’ll see you around.”

They arrive back at the hotel without incident in the gathering dusk, and Kiin, of whom she is even fonder, based on what Raxma told her earlier, is among the small crowd that throngs the truck, many giving a hand at Kiin’s insistence. Every time Cambara tries to lift something, Kiin or someone else discourages her from doing so. “Leave these to us,” the head of security says. “We are born to perform this sort of task, not you. Just relax.” In the end, she stands back, watching as the youths, under his supervision, bring out the heavier of the cases and then the lighter one, then carrying them unsteadily up the steps. One or the other of the youths queries, “What are in these; they are so bulky.”

SilkHair is beside himself with excitement, like a puppy that is in the company of its kind and wants to play. He quips to no one in particular, “She is too clever to be carrying stones.”

Gacal, for his part, is drawn to SilkHair the minute he lays his eyes on him; maybe because, in addition to being his only peer, he is more or less of the same height and of a similar build, and he is wearing clothes comparable in style and cut to his. Or maybe because he recognizes some of the boyish traits that are in evidence: a young boy out of place and trying hard to fit in with the grown-ups. SilkHair seems more on the level of the other youths though, in that, from the way he moves about, he feels as if he has already been admitted into the gun-carrying coterie. Observing him, Cambara is worried and wonders if SilkHair is more likely to feel the strong pull toward the armed militiamen, who are his kindred spirits, than he is to become close to Gacal as a playmate and companion. She knows that her work is cut out for her. She looks ahead to the exciting times and to the intimations of botheration as well as joy that are of a piece with being a parent, in her case a surrogate one. Early on in the exercise, Cambara assigns to the two of them the responsibility of remaining in the rooms and keeping count of things.

When the off-loading has concluded and she is sufficiently relaxed to look around, she is mildly shocked to discover that Gacal has remained in the rooms, as if he has more right than SilkHair to be guarding her property, and has sent SilkHair out to inform her that, in Gacal’s words, the unloading is complete and she can now return to her rooms to take over. And just as she heads for her rooms, SilkHair, instead of joining her, goes in the opposite direction, to where the armed sentries are gathered, their weapons leaning in a pile of disorder, exchanging crude repartee of the kind that might make a lady cringe. Cambara looks back over her shoulder, because curiosity stops her dead in her tracks. She is not at all surprised that the boy is in his element, participating in the ribald humor, and that he is one of a kind when in the company of the armed youths, not in hers or Gacal’s. Maybe she ought to have a rethink; maybe she ought not to try to impose her will on him.

Crestfallen, she leaves SilkHair to his choice for the moment and walks up the flight of stairs toward her rooms, deep in thought and eager to be reunited with Gacal. Finding the door shut, she calls out Gacal’s name as she gives it a judicious push, gentle at first and then a little firmer in her determination to open it. She tries to turn the handle but to no avail. After several unsuccessful attempts at pushing it open and unsure of what is happening or rather of what Gacal is up to, desperation begins to set in. What can he be doing, locking the room from inside? She can’t be certain in what state she has left the suitcases containing her cash or if he has had all the time in the world to help himself to everything: her passport, her notes, her sketch pads? Why is he not answering? She dreads what Arda will say when she learns how naive Cambara has been to trust a boy with no known history. Serves you right, she will say. The seeds of her suspicion are beginning to multiply to such an extent that she is about to take the drastic action of summoning Kiin and having the door broken, when her ears pick out the sound of room keys in the pockets of her caftan and she retrieves them in haste and uses them.

She lets herself in quietly. She tiptoes in, her despair mounting by the second. Topmost in her mind is his future as she has imagined it, a boy set to rights, given a life with a future. When he is not in the first room, and there is no sound from the inner room, which serves as her bedroom, she wonders if she will be staring the first signs of misfortune in the eye, if her luck is running out at last, if all that she has constructed with so much help from so many people will have come to nought. She is not sure how she might control her rage if she catches him fiddling, thieving. Wild with impatience, she moves forward speedily into her private sanctum, the refuge where she does her thinking, her writing, and sketching, only to come upon Gacal asleep, a pile of heavy books substituting for a pillow. He is lying on his back, his feet resting on a suitcase, his face partially hidden from view, his hands held together close to his chin and as though in namaste greeting and suggesting someone in worship. To his right flank but on the floor, a thin book titled Fly, Eagle, Fly lies open on page seven. Delighted to presume that he has been leafing through the text on which she is planning to base her play, she is, however, disturbed that he has read it, if that is what he has done, without her express permission.

Exhausted, she collapses on the bed a foot away.

A few minutes later, Kiin joins Cambara in her rooms, admittedly to find out not only how Cambara is coping with the fresh inrush of baggage but also how cramped or how accommodating the rooms look. Getting into the front room, she has had to watch her step, with suitcases everywhere, some open and their contents spread outside of them in piles, others pushed into the corner and heaped any which way on top of one another. Before proceeding any farther, Kiin can’t help assuming that Cambara is either searching for a specific item of clothing, which she has not found yet, or reorganizing her paraphernalia, what with the notepads, markers, makeup kits, eye pencils, and bottles of coloring stuff that Kiin cannot identify, into heaps before repacking them or is simply airing them.

Kiin holds the door handle as if she is prepared to pull it shut. On second thought, she stops where she is and says, “Since you are in the middle of sorting things out and I do not want to distract you, maybe I will come and see you another time. Then we’ll talk.”

Cambara, in a rush to welcome her, if only, among other things, to have Kiin enlighten her about her plans, misses her footing, almost falling over. She pauses to catch her breath and, as she speaks, stumbles over her words. “All this can wait. Please come in.” She pushes two of the suitcases that tripped her out of the way, creating more space for Kiin to enter.