Nuruddin Farah - Knots

“Done,” he says.

“Have you enjoyed it as much as you enjoyed the film you saw last night?” Cambara asks.

“I enjoyed this much more.”

“Tell me more.”

He asks, “What is it for, anyway?”

“What do you think it is for?”

“Would you like me to act in it? I would like you to be one of the eagles,” he says.

“Which one?”

“The younger one,” he says. “It will be great fun, like making a film. I would love to be in the play, as an actor. I can do it. Easy.”

Before she reacts to Gacal’s outpouring of emotions, the phone rings, and the deputy manager of the hotel informs her that a man would like to speak to her.

“The man’s name?”

“Dajaal.”

“Please put him on.”

“This is Dajaal,” the deep voice of a man comes on the line. “I am at the reception, and if you have a moment, I would like you to come down.”

She waits for him to explain why or to inform her that he has brought along Seamus or Bile, but he does nothing of the sort; he just hangs up.

For some reason, Cambara takes Dajaal’s behavior in a surprisingly positive light. She thinks that a man who is as economical with his words as Dajaal deserves nothing short of her respect. She gets to her feet in haste, ready to go down and meet with him. She tells Gacal to hurry up too, and they are at reception in a moment.

“Let’s go,” Dajaal says.

“Where?”

He doesn’t answer immediately.

“Where Dajaal?”

“We go first to your family property,” he says.

“Why go there?”

“There has been a change of plan.”

“What do you mean change of plan?”

“Seamus is at your family property, with a couple of carpenters, an electrician, and several others. He’s asked me to bring you to him. I am just the messenger, doing what he has asked me to.”

She remembers agreeing to meet up with Seamus so that the two might spend time together and talk over the carving of the masks that she has designed. Now he has turned his attention to her family property, helping fix it, make it habitable. Cambara refrains from asking Dajaal any of the questions that come to mind, including one about paying for his service and that of the others and one about determining how safe the place is. It’s not the time.

Instead, she says, “Can I bring along somebody?”

“Do you mean this young fellow?” Dajaal points his fingers teasingly at Gacal.

“What about me?”

Turning, she is surprised to see SilkHair, come back from shopping and wearing a pair of bright pink flip-flops, interpose himself between Dajaal and Cambara, invidiously pushing Gacal out of the way.

“So you’re back,” she says, sounding pleased.

“See,” he points at his pink flip-flops. “Don’t you like them?”

Gacal says, “How can you bear to wear these?”

“Can he come too?” she asks Dajaal.

“Who am I to say no if you say yes?” he says.

There is something lighthearted about Dajaal, who delights in joining the raillery all around, an avuncular man playing the role of a peacemaker between Gacal and SilkHair. He goes ahead of them toward the vehicle, Cambara following closely. She wonders if things are shaping up better than she has ever imagined they would: two boys, an avuncular Dajaal, and at last the family property back in her hands. Maybe calling on Bile will be the bonus of the day.

“How is Bile?” she asks him.

“Would you like to see him?”

“Is he out of his dark mood?”

Not speaking, Dajaal stares into the distance. Maybe he just does not want to commit himself either way. Meanwhile, he opens the front passenger door and tells the man sitting there to go into the back with the boys. Dajaal does not bother to introduce Cambara. That the man is brandishing a revolver and that he will be sharing the backseat with Gacal and SilkHair does not agree with the plans she has in mind for them — a life in which they are not made vulnerable to gun appeal — but then who is she to quibble over the matter of a small handgun when SilkHair has handled AK-47s and machine guns?

Dajaal goes around to where she is standing, and he places his hand discreetly on the shoulder closer to him, as if assuring her that there is nothing to worry about and that everything will be fine; she will see.

“I hope so,” she says. And she gets in beside him.

Dajaal drives out of the hotel gates, turns left onto a sandy road, and then takes the bend fast in the petulant attitude of a man to whom someone has shown an undeserved mean-spiritedness. The vehicle veers out of control and comes close to colliding with a boulder on the wrong side of the road. He slows down, however, and holds the steering wheel firm in his hands until the tires get a solid purchase on the ground and the car has regained its balance.

Gacal and SilkHair chat nonstop, though, teasing each other, pulling each other’s leg, each putting riddles to the other to solve. The man in the back, fiercely alert to his surroundings, is unsmiling, unspeaking — poised, gun ready, as if he can discern some danger only he is able to see. In addition, it seems to her as if Dajaal is ill at ease with her; he has a sour face for the first time since they first met. Has she done something to offend him? Or said something that has upset him? Or is she being oversensitive, as usual?

“Is everything okay, Dajaal?” she asks.

He nods without looking at her but says nothing.

Cambara resists asking the man in the back if he is expecting an attack on their vehicle; not only because she is not sure if his mood has something to do with Dajaal’s but also because she remembers how often she has run into Somalis who are in the habit of trespassing on her generous disposition when she inquires how they have fared in the civil war, many of whom have spoken of war-related trauma. Many point out how lucky she has been not to have experienced it firsthand. She has read enough about these men and women and met a sufficient number of these veterans to know that some of them tell the tales of their woes as though they were medals they wear to a gathering of fellow sufferers; they revel in excluding those, like her, who have not endured the physical and mental pain of the strife.

The man’s childish pout and his physical posture, no longer as refined as when he was younger and serving in the army, equal a body language with which she has become familiar since meeting Zaak and Wardi. She has known of other Somalis who have come out of Mogadiscio following the disintegration and whose moods are high one moment, full of jovial talk and amity, and then in the next instant, when you think that all is going well with their world, something goes out of sync, and all of a sudden they behave out of character. Doleful, she has often seen Wardi going down, down, down, drooling, a man devoid of life’s energy. His life, or what there was of it when dejected, would fall apart right before her, literally as she watched him, disintegrating. How tragic! The sad part was that he blamed only her for his muddle, even when she had no hand in it. An individual under so much civil war pressure is bound to succumb to the strain of madness that passes for clan politics, even though most Somalis tell you that what keeps the fire of the strife going is the economic base on which the civil war rests. She has known Wardi to waver between his loyalty to the principles of justice and his allegiance to his immediate blood community. You can bet that anyone who has lived through the worst years of Somalia’s strife will have a god-awful countenance like the man sitting in the back. Wardi has no equal when it comes to his unjustified sense of paranoia. Maybe this man too? Not so Dajaal; she must ask him why.