Nuruddin Farah - Knots

“Doesn’t a veil make the wearer feel lonely?”

Cambara can’t think of an answer.

Again a question. “You know what?” he says.

“Tell me,” she encourages him.

“Every virtue is its own reward.”

Then silence, as total as that of a classroom in which matriculants are writing their finals. Cambara wonders if grave changes are in store for her, and she is nervous, like a teenager in love for the first time. She is in a twitter, because she has met Bile on his home ground and has proven herself worthy of his trust. She hopes to deal with his and her problems with the subtlety of a highly professional puppeteer controlling her marionettes with the help of invisible wires.

Then she phones Dajaal. “Please pick me up in about an hour and a half.”

“How is Bile?”

“He is okay.”

Bile’s secret, which is how Cambara wants to think of his indisposition, will be safe with her, for she has no wish to speak of it to anyone, neither to Seamus nor to Dajaal. She assumes that given Bile’s sense of discretion — why does she always tend to believe in her heart that she knows him when she doesn’t — he may not approve of her broadcasting his bodily aberrations to his close friends and sundry acquaintances. At least, from the time she spent with him, she got the impression that he is a discreet man.

When she thinks that Dajaal has left to pick her up, she rings Seamus to ask him what the two boys, her charges, are up to and when he, Seamus, is likely to return to the apartment. When Seamus says that he won’t be there until early evening, if not much later, and that, in any case, he will bring along a takeaway and that she needn’t worry herself about Gacal and SilkHair, for they are being kept purposefully busy, she gets down to the business of ridding the apartment and herself of the rank odor. She strives to work as quietly as possible so Bile might find shelter in the sleep of his embarrassment. She even considers disconnecting her mobile and the landline to make sure that no ringing phones disturb him. On second thought, she abandons the idea as being too drastic a measure.

She scrubs the floors of the bathroom and then has a long, very hot shower herself before changing into the first outfit she lays her hands on, an ill-fitting pair of baggies and a matching top — she hopes they are Bile’s — before washing her own clothes to get rid of the intrusive smell. The stench is so pervasive that not only has it stuck to her body, escorting her everywhere, but it has also started to reside in her nostrils, as if permanently glued to the hair growing there. She washes her own clothes, then she bolts the bathroom door from the inside and loads the wet clothes into the drying machine, praying that Bile does not wake up, need the bathroom, since this appears to be the only one, and find her in his pajamas, dressed like a dog’s dinner. Moreover, part of her is fearful that he may have misunderstood her honorable right-minded actions. But what are they, these respectable intentions? What are her designs, since she must have some?

As she listens to the thudding, rhythmic sound of the drying machine, she returns, in memory, to the first few days spent at Zaak’s as a guest, and she cannot help comparing her disapproval then, exposed as she was to Zaak’s malodorous condition, to her attitude today, which, on the face of it, appears more tolerant. She wonders if she has found Zaak’s evil-smelling mouth disturbing because it did not connect her in any way to one of her former states: that of mother to a sweet young boy and that of daughter to a bedridden father so sick the last few months of his life that he would occasionally wet his bed and soil his clothes. That in her mind she prefers referring to the mishap involving Bile as a bodily aberration and seems not to be highly disturbed by it can only indicate that she is inclined to suffer it without it getting under her skin the way Zaak did. Anyhow, how does it happen that in less than a fortnight she has had the fortune or misfortune to meet two men, one of them with a God-almighty BO that you can’t help avoiding, the other smeared with his waste, like some tribal dancer painted with dung?

Apropos of this, she quotes to herself the Somali wisdom that if feces were wealth, everybody would call it by a different name. She reasons that she is in all likelihood more charitable toward Bile because of his kindness to her. If she is intolerant of Zaak and cannot endure his smelly presence, it is simply because he has been uncompromising and been beastly toward her.

She sits on the toilet, with the lid down, as much for the comfort of resting her exhausted bones as for the fact that it might afford her a pause to make sure that she does not overreach herself. Then she resolves to hold herself in check and not to lament the sad truth that she has not been alone with her thoughts since getting to Mogadiscio, what with the constant interferences and external forces that have seldom allowed her to concentrate her mind wholly on herself. Rushing here, rushing there, a light makeup before an all-woman’s party, run, and run, bone tired. Granted, where in Toronto, she might entertain an idea for its own sake, indulge herself to her heart’s content, and, if she is of a mind, unplug her phone, take a break from it all, and lie fallow like the land of a farm resting, here it has not been possible for her to lead a private existence. Always in some car, being ferried there and back; constantly in the sight of a gun, never mind if it is friendly; always under someone’s constant supervision purportedly for her safety; sentries at the gate, either granting or denying her entry; armed youths out to ensnare her. How annoying that her movements in this city are restricted.

Home is Mogadiscio, home from Toronto, but the question is: Is she the homing pigeon among the cats, or has the cat been put among the pigeons to flutter their dovecotes? No doubt, her presence has brought a number of situations to a head and has somehow stimulated sufficient interest in a handful of persons who have made a number of changes, many of them for the better. The way Cambara sees it, she has prompted Kiin to set things in motion with the help of the Women’s Network, Zaak having to all intents and purposes shown her that he wouldn’t give her a hand. Bile has few equals, in that he has stepped in, prodding Dajaal into action, without her ever soliciting his intervention. And Dajaal has delivered: He helped to repossess the property but not before Kiin and Farxia conspired to rid it of Jiijo, every one of them risking their lives. In the meantime, Seamus too has joined in, most likely at Bile’s suggestion. What more can she want?

She gets to her feet, pulls the door of the drying machine open to determine if her clothes are now sufficiently dry for her to wear them. They are. Scarcely has she taken them out when another of her knee-jerk reminiscences deposits her at the door to yet another memory: that of her cooking for Zaak’s militiamen. She stops in midmotion, telling herself that feeding is one of the most ancient strategies women have employed to cope with the restlessness caused by men’s overabundance of testosterone; feeding them is one way of disempowering them, even if for a period of brief duration. Women have fallen back repeatedly on making men ingest the foods they have cooked and “bewitched” them, in this way pacifying their conjugal cohorts’ agitated nerves. It is not surprising how, in many languages — Somali included — the notion of eating is interchangeable with lovemaking.

She dwells in an animated suspension, neither managing to start putting on her clothes, which although not completely dry are wearable, nor to embark on another activity. One thought leads to another, and she is telling herself that there is no doubt in her mind that if fighting off the militiamen on the day she met Dajaal and Bile is seen as the first time fortune smiled in her favor so as to make things work to her advantage, then cooking for Zaak’s militiamen when she did, mollifying and therefore moderating their behavior, was the second most important step. Moreover, she will never forget the youths’ initial shock of discovering that chopping off a chicken’s head with the intention of lunching on it, pulling its viscera out in one go, and plucking its feathers after boiling it are no easier matter than putting your finger on the trigger of an AK-47 and killing a human being.