Nuruddin Farah - Knots

Between showers and a dinner together, Arda held out an envelope, which, when opened, Cambara discovered to contain an open return air ticket to Nairobi, a lot of cash in thousands of U.S. dollars, in small and large denominations, a yearlong and renewable insurance policy for two, with one of the parties described simply as “partner.”

“Do you have dates by which I must leave?”

Arda replied, “We’ll wait for the letter from the commissioning editor at CBS, who has assured my neighbor that she has put it in the post. Meantime I’ve booked your onward flight, window seat all the way. I’ll let you decide on your return date.”

“How sweet of you!”

“You’ll be a better judge, since you’ll be there.”

“What else?”

“Damn. I clean forgot.”

“What?”

Arda retrieved an envelope from the top of the sideboard, which, sitting down, she passed on to Cambara. “The yellow fever and cholera certificate.”

“But I haven’t had the jabs.”

“It’s all taken care of.”

“How did you swing it?”

“I know how you hate taking your shots.”

“Did you bribe somebody?”

“There are ways to get around such problems.”

“You’ve left nothing to chance, have you?”

Cambara left for Nairobi as arranged. She hired a taxi from the airport and went directly to the place she was to share with Zaak. It irked her to be there exhausted from the long trip, having barely slept a wink because of a neighbor who talked endlessly. When she got to Zaak’s door, he was so deep in sleep that it took her and two security men from the apartment complex almost half an hour to rouse him from it. She interpreted irritably the fact that he was unprepared for her arrival. Her irascibility did not augur well, and she knew it.

Within an hour, soon after a shower, she joined him in the kitchenette and right away noticed the telltale disfigurements in body and soul, which she would see more of when she met other Somalis who had just come from Mogadiscio: trauma born of desolation. She could not put her finger on why she felt uncomfortable in his company, maybe because she sensed that he was transmitting to her a flow of detrimental vibes, possibly without being aware of them. She held back and wouldn’t get any closer to him, afraid that he might have transported some kind of contagion from the fighting that he had fled. To have the place to herself, she sent him out on an errand to the local general store with cash to buy basic groceries, including coffee, tea, and fresh milk. Then she had a couple of hours’ sleep. She awoke to Somali being spoken and was able to work out in no time that it was the BBC Somali Service early-evening bulletin.

They dined out their first evening together at an Indian restaurant two doors away from the apartment complex, prepared to pay for it. Whatever attempts either made to get to know the other or at least to converse bore no positive results: They behaved as if they were a married couple who were under the torment of a recent estrangement and who had no idea how to overcome their mutual antagonism. At some point, she decided that sitting and facing each other in a restaurant when neither was saying much and she was too exhausted was not worth a plugged nickel. She asked for the bill, which she settled, and they left. When they got to the apartment, she retired to her room forthwith, wishing him good night.

From the following morning on, she relegated every other worry to a back burner, determined to throw herself into her work. She got up early and fresh, poised to activate contact with the coordinator of the Kenyan crew, a young woman who doubled as a cameraperson/driver, who told her to wait for her and her Somali-speaking colleague, who had arranged for the interview appointments, at the main gate.

Half an hour later, Cambara, dressed in a discreet manner, eager to get started, and holding her notes in folders in an old leather bag in preference to a showy executive case, was at the main entrance. She introduced herself to the two women in the beat-up Toyota. Compared to the one at the wheel — younger, and guessing from her name, Ngai, Kikuyu-speaking — who looked livelier, the Somali-speaking woman sitting in the back of the vehicle was massive and broad as a cupboard. It was she who said something first, speaking to Cambara in halting Somali that sounded as if she had learned the language in an after-work adult education class, unable to get her tongue flexibly around all the gutturals in Somali. Next to her — in fact, within reach of her stretched hand — were the tools of the cameraperson’s trade, including a camcorder and other instruments. It was difficult for Cambara to know where she was from. The huge woman was carrying nothing save a kitschy handbag, pink like her dress and her shoes, the latter also in imitation leather. As soon as she saw her spread in the back of the vehicle, Cambara knew she wouldn’t rely on her for much assistance.

Ngai was a bouncy, slim, very friendly and talkative woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, pigeon-breasted, head recently shaved, and with eyes as huge as stray UFOs spotted over a mountain at dawn. She was easygoing and full of life, and she and Cambara hit it off immediately, each returning the compliment to the other. But she was a hairy driver and went into the blind bends rather perilously, often speeding when it was unsafe to do so and jabbering away mostly about the Somalis who, according to her, were everywhere, especially in the center of the city, and seemingly moneyed. It was obvious that Cambara took an instant liking to her.

“I kept telling my countrywoman sitting in the back that I am beginning to think that maybe Somalia is richer than our country, Kenya,” Ngai said, when they were on the road for a few minutes.

“Why do you say that?”

“All the five-stars in Nairobi show they are booked for months, no vacancies,” the thin woman said. “We always thought your country was much poorer than Kenya, kind of desert. You don’t have petrol, do you? Like Libya or Saudi?”

She couldn’t but shockingly admit how little Africans knew about one another’s countries as a result, ironically, of their biased colonial heritage. After all, what did she know about Kenya or neighboring lands? Not as much as she did about Europe or North America. As part of her effort to create a good working relationship, she explained the class nature of the Somalis flying into Nairobi and putting up in five-star hotels and those who were arriving in dhows and overcrowded boats that docked in Mombasa and, because they were poor, were being treated as stateless and therefore as refugees. She placed the two sets of Somalis in the civil war context. “We’ll learn more about them as we talk to more and more of them,” Cambara promised.

Then her series of interviews started, and she worked from early until late on some days, seeing less and less of Zaak in the daytime and more and more of him and Ngai, who went with the two of them to restaurants, in the evening. Cambara introduced Zaak as her man to some of the Somalis they met, and the two of them put on an act for their own and Ngai’s benefit. In private, Cambara kept him at a distance, and he didn’t seem to mind that much.

Because of the topicality of the events unfolding in Somalia, Cambara had a select number of her pieces aired on prime time in Toronto, including some in which she interviewed the staff of the Canadian and British High Commissions as well as the embassies of a handful of Arab and European countries, where the Somalis were headed. The notices in the Toronto papers were favorable, one of them, The Globe and Mail, describing the pieces as “impressive, the job of a pro.” There was a photo of Cambara, big enough to mount on her mother’s bedroom wall as a memento.