Nuruddin Farah - Knots

He talks a fever talk. At first, he is inaudible. Then what he says does not make sense, until she asks him to repeat it two or three times.

“Tell me,” he says, “what is gold to someone who does not understand its value? What’s a mansion to someone who won’t live in it? What manner of a man trains as a doctor and helps to cure others but can’t apply what he has learned to his own illness?”

Cambara decides she is bearing witness to the birth of a terrible ugliness, the start of a gradual falling apart of a giant man who is otherwise famous, from what she has heard, for his inner strength. The swelling of his face puts her in mind of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, playing the role of Kurtz, a highly disturbed former military officer gone madder and madder with insatiable greed who builds, neurotically, a castle of bones out of the brutal massacres of humans. She thinks Bile is caving in, his nihilistic self-assessments confronting the evil manifestations of the darker side of the Somali character in these troubled times. Now silent, he gives the impression of being self-contained, a noble man refusing to share his internal torments with a woman barely known to him. Why pretend to be the willing host of this wretchedness?

Why hasn’t he consulted a doctor? Why hasn’t he left the country if he is of the view that there are no other doctors good enough to diagnose his condition? Unless he assumes there is a way of tapping a mysterious underlife in the darkness in which he has dwelled? Maybe something worse than she can ever know is the matter with him. In any case, what can she do? Can she help him come out of the land closed off in a faraway country of profound depression?

There are huge lacks in both of them, she decides. A pity she does not know him well, does not know if he has contemplated suicide. Based on a bottle of pills she is not quite sure she remembers seeing somewhere in one of the rooms, she has her suspicions that this is what he has tried to do. Her mother will tell her, perhaps rightly, that she must not take on someone else’s problems. Why must she fall for problem men? But Bile is not a problem man; he is a solution man. To discourage her, her mother will remind her of how Zaak and Wardi battened on her until she was no longer of use to them. See how ungrateful they proved themselves to be; see how they struck out on their own without a care in the world for her feelings. Won’t Bile do the same? What guarantees do you have that he will not?

He mumbles something as she finally frees her hand from his clasp. “Are you okay?” she asks, when he chokes on his words.

Grinning, his eyes alight, he says, “It is like blaming your feather mattress for your bedsores.” Then he looks at her cockily, staring at her in a way that surprises her. “Like blaming your feather mattress for your bedsores. Can you imagine?”

A premonition, overwhelming in its intensity, comes suddenly in the form of an inner warning voice that advises her not to think of him as an insane man speaking wisdom but as a man gradually recovering his senses. The voice suggests that she must not shun him but remain on her guard.

He sits up and, bringing to bear a lighthearted feeling on his bodily movements, wills himself first to look at Cambara in as friendly a way as he can muster, and then grins. For her. After which, he puts a great deal of purpose into placing the book he has been trying to read aside, managing this simple act with the slowness of a person with Down’s syndrome attempting to speak a complicated thought. Bile’s eyes dim after a moment, his features darken with dissonant intimations, and his lips move with the terrible exertion of someone emerging out of an ungodly grouse. With his brooding mood seemingly rawer than when she arrived, Cambara fears that he will take her along with him into a world of despair. He rises to his feet and tries a step, hesitates, half tumbles over, then straightens his body, not quite as straight as a bow. His expression is wooden, his eyes as heavy as lead. He finally gives up and lowers his body back into the couch. He sighs. The eerie quality of his unspeaking stare causes her much worry.

He says, “Blame your bedsores on the mattress.”

“What are you saying?” she asks.

But he does not answer. There is something disturbingly haunting about the diffuseness of his eyes, as if they are wrestling with an unidentified host of negative forces of unknown origin. At this point, she asks herself if Dajaal, who may have known of Bile’s state of physical and mental deterioration, has set her up. But why? Is he throwing her a challenge? See how you fare — you who have a liking for difficult tasks, stray boys with no parents, and armed youths with no future. Or is Dajaal intimating, in his own way, that she is somehow the cause of Bile’s torment and that it is time she dealt with it?

“Come,” she says.

“Where?”

“A shower will do you a lot of good.”

He takes his time to wrap himself with the bathrobe, and, discouraging her from treating him like an invalid anymore, he stands up, first swaying a little and eventually standing upright before doddering toward the bathroom.

“Do you need any help?” she says to his back.

He stops walking and, nodding, mumbles a phrase that sounds to Cambara like “Yes, please.” She hears him not with her ears but with her heart.

“The trousers,” he says, pronouncing the word as if it has more consonants. “My legs are too weak,” he adds. “My hands too.”

It takes several clumsy efforts for her to help him remove his trousers, at one point the two of them nearly falling into a heap. Then, despite the pervasive odor, she remains with him until she runs the water and he has had a douche. Then she finds and then passes him a clean towel, a pair of slip-ons, a T-shirt, and a sarong.

She leads him by the hand to his bedroom. The bed looks slept in, the room stuffy. She opens the windows to let in air. After she has tucked him in, she returns to the bathroom to soak his soiled clothes. In the kitchen, she clears space and finds enough ingredients to prepare a vegetable consommé. When she hears him mumbling a few words, maybe calling to her, she finds a bowl and goes to feed him. Again she says, “Good for you,” giving him spoonfuls of it. On her way out of the room, she takes interest in the photographs decorating the walls: of two girls, one of them pretty and ordinary looking, the other a Down’s syndrome, and of an older woman, who shares family resemblance with Bile. Then back to the bathroom to soap his dirty clothes, pouring on them water close to boiling, almost burning herself when she first puts her hand in.

It bothers her that she cannot decide what to do next. There is no shortage of people to ring up: Dajaal, Seamus, Kiin, Farxia — the only medical doctor, albeit a gynecologist, only she doesn’t recall taking her mobile number.

Back in the bedroom, she watches him eat his soup. The smell of the sick; the clothes worn night and day; pairs of socks dropped on the floor and not picked up — these convince her to take charge, the urge turning into a commitment. Now she remembers Seamus or Dajaal saying that Bile has good and bad days.

She isn’t certain if she is imagining it or if Seamus has said that when Bile’s days are bad, they are so bad, like the darkness of winter descending on the soil of Bile’s mind, that nothing will grow on such a soil. If good, the days are bright; the sun shines and shines all the time. If this is his bad, bad day, will she get to see his good day?

“I’ve been meaning to ask?” he says.

“Please,” she encourages him.

“Doesn’t it feel lonely?”

How bizarre: a man speaking in non sequiturs.

“Doesn’t what feel lonely?”