Nuruddin Farah - Knots

As soon as she walks, unescorted, into the apartment, a telling odor, ominous in its fierceness and rather irrepressible, hits Cambara in the face, overwhelming her senses. The smell takes her back to a memory in her distant past, and which she thinks of no reason to relive: a baby making a terrible mess, soiling its clothes with its own waste, and she, the mother of the child, cleaning it all up.

Feeling protective toward Bile, as soon as she has worked out the source of the odor before taking even one step further. She decides not to allow anyone else, including or rather especially the old man, to be privy to any of this, she closes the door behind her. When she tries to figure out what to do or how to attend to the smell, a recalcitrant thought, disturbing in its meaning, crosses her mind.

Then she approaches Bile, his eyes glazed over, soiled, the dominating image that comes to her one of a strong workhorse with weak knees. He is lying on his side, dissipated, with no more energy to expend on getting up, his left hand under his head, the right hand balled into a fist and stretched forward; both the back and the front of his trousers brown, most probably with his waste; one of his slippers off and the other half on. His right cheek is plastered with the thick deposit of dried yellow detritus probably stained with some partly digested food that the rest of his body, not agreeing with it, has rejected. It is obvious from his misted-over gaze that Bile does not even recognize her, but, as if needing to exonerate him of blame, she remembers that when they met, she was in an “elsewhere veil.” Now she is in a caftan, hair uncovered; he is in his apartment and is in an otherworldly state of mind, hardly capable of determining how come he has ended up adorning his clothes with his bodily discharges.

She does what she has done many times before as a mother. First she helps him to a half crouch, allowing him all the time in the world to stay on his knees, then assisting him to lean forward and against her before pulling him, very slowly, and gradually up and up and up into a sitting position on the couch. She minds neither the awfulness of the stench nor the fact that his vomit-and waste-stained cheek and his smudged trousers are rubbing against her body. After she has let him catch his constrained breath, she makes him lie on the couch on his back.

The sun entering the apartment falls on Bile’s eyes, but they do not reflect light, only darkness, like that of a night of terrible sorrow. Even so, a distant smile traces his face.

No time to spare, Cambara moves speedily about the apartment and soon enough she finds the bathroom, where she notices an unusual mess: the sink blocked with debris, the toilet and the seat of the bidet edged with slurry, the paper off its holder, unfurled and lying on its side. She goes to the kitchen, fills a kettle with water, and turns the flame on. While the water is boiling, she goes back to the bathroom and runs the taps, discovering that there is hot water for a shower. A minute or so later, she comes out carrying a huge bath towel, a flannel bathrobe, and a bucket full of hot water. All this while, Bile is lost to the world. When she comes to do the preliminary cleansing before leading him into the bathroom for his eventual shower, he does not collaborate or show any resistance, nor does he open his eyes as she wipes his face clean with a flannel. She moves him to this side and then that side until she places the huge bath towel under him. Then she covers him with the bathrobe. She undoes his belt; he stirs, alerting her to his conscious state. But even though he does not push her away, she leaves the room to answer the kettle’s singing, and make a pot of tea. She finds a tray and some honey.

She helps him sit up, the bathrobe covering his front, with the huge towel below him needing to be readjusted. If she doesn’t solicit his opinion as to what she must do next or does not ask how he is, it is because she believes that he is in no condition to describe what is happening to him. She also knows that for a man of his age, he looks very trim, but there is no knowing what the question “How are you?” might produce and whether, trained as a doctor, he will be too scientific in his litany of complaints. Has he vomited because of an intestinal obstruction or because of a disorder in his inner ear? Has he struck his head against something, injuring it, and then, having lost consciousness, vomited, let go of his poo, as an infant might? His liver may have failed; he might be developing gout, the way a baobab tree might grow a calloused fungus. In a man his age, anything can happen; in one’s second babyhood, anything can occur.

She makes the tea strong. Then she finds the sugar, two spoons of which end up in the cup, and stirs it with determined energy. As she places the cup in his hands, after adding honey into the brew, she encourages him to take a sip. She says, “Good for you,” in the same way a mother might address an ailing child whom she is encouraging to drink a bowl of broth. “Good for you.”

She waits until he puts the rim of the cup to his lower lip to take his first slow swallow. Then she imagines Bile bringing gravitas, more than anyone else she has ever known, to the idea of sadness, nearly ennobling it. Clean of face, because she has already wiped it, less disconsolate of expression, because maybe he now feels energized by her presence, Cambara assumes that she sees intimations of normalcy in his behavior as well as in his body language, optimistically concluding that she is wrong about his being unwell, which now strikes her as no more than a moment’s aberration. nothing very serious. She ascribes the swelling of his face to the sudden gaining of much weight due to the indisposition of diarrheal complications. A day’s bed rest with lots of TLC thrown in will do him wonders. As a student of living theater, which she hasn’t had much time to practice or perfect, she sees him as a man acting out an imagined life at the same time as he is living it, in the end, crowning it all with the finest of details.

Bile extends his hand to her, and she takes it. Pulling him toward her, she is tempted to give him a kiss on the cheek, convinced that this innocuous act might touch him wherever it is that he is hurting and cure him. That this is the first time in a long while that she has found herself in a situation that has so moved her, making her want to give him a kiss on the cheek, must mean something. In Canada, she might not hesitate to give a peck to a man leaving a party soon after being introduced to him but not here, where things are different, especially after the civil war. Some people might look askance at a woman doing what she has done. Not only has she stayed at Zaak’s house as a guest, but she has come into Bile’s apartment with no chaperone. And now look at what she has been up to: She has disrobed him and is now waiting to give him a shower. No way will such an insular society permit her to employ her theater props of the kind a mufti won’t approve.

He won’t let go of her hand, no matter how gently she makes her intimations clear: that she wants it back to keep his bathrobe in place. He holds it as a child might a teddy bear in his sleep: hogging, hugging, squeezing it. Her naive hope that the tea will revive him does not materialize, at least not instantly. Now and then he winces as if in pain, then in less than the blink of an eye, his expressions worry her when she tries to give him a shower. His eyes do not seem right, not at all. Maybe so much suffering of whatever nature does not necessarily uplift one. He is restless, so jumpy, that his eyes are opening and closing with the speed of a worried stutterer’s tongue. His eyes are totally vacuous, a sad, sad emptiness caused, most likely, by the kicking in of a delayed reaction to antidepressants taken ill advisedly.