Nuruddin Farah - Knots

Dajaal gets back into the car, waves very enthusiastically to Seamus, to whom he speaks in kitchen Somali, spiced with a couple of infinitives in Italian, and then says to Cambara, “I’ll come back for you in an hour, to take you to Bile, if that is what you want.”

“That’s what I want. Thank you.”

Then he reverses the vehicle, making as much ruckus as the mason drilling into the wall does. Seamus clenches his teeth irritably and waits until Dajaal is safely out of the gate and out of his hearing before he says to Cambara, “How terrible, terrible, terrible.” Not sure she has heard his comment right, she grins.

After a relative pause in which he weighs matters in his head, Seamus speaks to her in English, even though for some reason he is inclined to lapse into Italian today. She has no idea why she expects him to put a cigar or a pipe into his mouth and light it up. She imagines that the hair on his face or head will benefit from becoming more wreathed in ashes of a riotous sort, salt-and-pepper attractive, curls the shape of garlic from the Mezzogiorno, like those of a don at some elite Jesuit college somewhere, where they drink good wine, eat terrible food of the boiled variety, and address one another by their surnames, no titles.

He says, “Welcome to this neck of the woods, my dear girl,” and he approaches her with care.

She says, “Good to see you wherever, whenever.”

As she chums up to him to give him a peck on the cheeks thrice, she catches a whiff of his sweat; she assumes that he may have had only a birdbath since yesterday, as the house is not yet connected to the city’s aqueduct or to an alternative system. She can’t help comparing his odor to Zaak’s and deciding that this does not disturb her in the least, because Seamus has been hard at work in honest slog, whereas Zaak is a lazy dullard. It’s under the pain of being tickled that she has kissed him; she has had to show restraint, despite the temptation of letting go of a chortle, or is she being too girlish for that? She decides to ask the first fully formed question that comes to her.

“How is Bile?” she says.

“At times, he can’t tell the difference between day and night,” Seamus says.

“How long has he been like that?”

“Off and on for two days now.”

“That bad?” she wonders aloud.

“It could be worse,” Seamus says. “I hope we can do something about his deteriorating state.”

“We? Who is we?” she asks.

“You and I and everybody around him.”

Not wanting to catch his eyes, she looks away.

“Especially Dajaal,” Seamus adds.

Then he apologizes for rescheduling their meeting. “In one way, I felt things were so barmy I sought solace in work. Came here, where I dossed down in one of the rooms on a mat. I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to the apartment. Anyway, it was almost one o’clock in the morning when I was ready to take a break.”

“A formidable commitment, indeed,” she says.

Her eyes encounter his, and she looks into them from close range, the brownness of his dark pupils, which are in the process of withdrawing from being seen, startles her. Here is a man, she thinks, who might use his shamanic powers to good effect, if he were to choose to.

“There’s a lot to be done,” he assures her.

She takes in her surroundings, agrees with him, and then adds, “But now that you’ve laid the foundation of the work, which is the most demanding aspect of any job, I’m certain that the remainder will be a lot easier.”

A man, most likely a plumber, walks by, his young assistant following, and they pick up a cistern each and then disappear into the bowels of the house without exchanging a word with either of them.

Seamus says, his eyebrows raised, “Espresso?”

Before responding to his offer, she commits a few moments to discovering where her two charges have ended up and what they have been doing. She locates them easily enough, because they are close by: SilkHair mixing chattily with the armed militiamen operating the gates; Gacal standing at the foot of the ladder, having attached himself to the electrician, busy passing him his tools and sharing a joke with another man removing coils of electric wire from their casings.

“I would love an espresso, thank you,” she says.

Then he says, “Sorry,” to Cambara and goes straight to where two of the militiamen have turned over a china washbasin to sit on, as they chat away with obvious excitement to SilkHair. Cambara hears him give the command Kac —Somali for “Stand up”—his pronunciation of the guttural c in kac perfect. The young men rise at his behest all right but, in typical Somali fashion, admit no wrong and argue in self-justification. According to them, their body weights together are so light they cannot break the washbasin by sitting on it. Seamus wags his finger at them and, before leaving them, speaks his last salvo. “Maya, maya,” he repeats. “No, no.”

He beckons her to follow him to the hall, which he has turned into a workshop. He goes behind a worktable, on which there are papers scattered where he may have scribbled his notes. When he sits down, his tools and some of the masks that he has carved since their last encounter are within easy reach. And to the right of the unoccupied surface of the worktable is a flask and beside it two demitasses. In a corner behind the worktable is an espresso machine and next to it several large bottles of mineral water; to the back of Seamus is a small fridge.

“Such heels, these militiamen,” he says.

Brooding and silent, he makes the espresso. She is taken with the beauty, the moment she sees them, of the lifelike face and head masks that Seamus has carved for her play in the likeness of eagles and chickens. The masks have become the object of her new enhancement; she is so captivated that she dares not turn her gaze away. No one looks happier than a touchy-feely Cambara who now lifts a full-bodied mask hewed out of fine wood in the semblance of a young eagle, almost bringing it close enough to her face to kiss its gorgeousness, then another, this time one sculpted in the semblance of a mother eagle, then one of a young chicken nervously cackling.

“What do you take with your espresso?”

“A glass of water, please,” she says, and she sits down and then turns around and extends both her hands to receive the espresso he has just made for her in one hand and then the water in the other.

Again, she focuses on the masks.

“They are gorgeous beyond belief,” she says.

“I’m not done with them.”

“I love what I see.”

“You are very sweet.”

She tells herself that a lot has indeed taken place since her first unannounced call at this house, in a body tent, making her acquaintance of Jiijo and then setting about worming her way into her confidence before moving in on her for the kill, so to speak. It has been a worthwhile effort.

Now she says to Seamus, “Tell me about Dajaal.”

“What do you wish to know?”

“What’s bothering him?”

Seamus pulls at his liberally grown beard at the same time as he begins to insinuate a couple of the strands of hair close to the right side of his mouth into it.

“There is a lot that he keeps close to his chest. Dajaal has been in a snit ever since he completed his assignment, which, among other things, involved the repossessing of your property. When I pressed him, he admitted to his unhappiness; he is very upset that I’ve carved masks in the likeness of eagles and chickens,” Seamus says. “He does not approve of what we are doing.”

“To what do you ascribe this?” Cambara asks.

“I have never known him to reveal his religious leaning to this extent; I’ve never thought of him as gung-ho devout,” Seamus says.