Nuruddin Farah - Knots

Not sure that she has heard a tapping on the door, she listens for it a second time, but nothing happens. Then she hears the sound of the key turning in the apartment door, and she ceases all movement, waiting for the person who is now indoors to identify himself before coming out of the bathroom and making her appearance.

“It is me, Seamus,” the voice says.

“I am in the bathroom,” she lets him know.

Then she takes off the borrowed clothes she has been wearing and puts on her own, even if a bit damp in the armpits or the nether regions in which some moisture has gathered. She comes out, her hands busy smoothing the creases.

Maybe there is no basis for her supposition that Dajaal is trying to avoid her and has, instead, persuaded Seamus to replace her. To ascertain if this is the case, she says, “I rang Dajaal to come get me.”

“There has been a small security problem,” Seamus explains. “Dajaal has dropped me off and gone back to deal with it urgently. Something to do with a kinsman of Gudcur’s who’s turned up armed at one of the checkpoints leading to your family property. One of Qasiir’s boys shot the kinsman dead point-blank. Dajaal is organizing both the removal of the corpse and the burial before nightfall.”

In her mind, she pushes all that has to do with skirmishes and gunfights aside, because she sees these armed combats as belonging to a realm different from her domain. And now that she is calmer and feels less compelled to deal with emergencies resulting from Bile’s affliction, cleaning up the mess after him and coping with his needs, she takes fresh notice of things. How well-appointed the apartment is; what a refined handiwork, presumably Seamus’s, from what Kiin has informed her.

“When will this insecurity end?”

“Not for a good while yet,” Seamus says.

“You seem unfazed. How do you manage?”

“Haven’t I told you that I am from Belfast?”

“Even so, this is Mogadiscio. Remember that.”

“So. What if it is?”

There is an awkward silence.

“Tea?”

“Yes, please.”

Seamus goes into the kitchen to make it. She joins him there just about. She stands facing him, her back leaning against the doorjamb, her legs splayed. She finds the kitchen pleasantly kitted with all the gadgets you need to produce a decent meal. She deems it slightly impolite to ask, but she suspects that Seamus is the factotum running this ménage, the efficient handyman with the practical know-how, the cook, the repairman when the generator packs up. Typical of a Somali to be the beneficiary of “Euro largesse.” The sad truth is that when death comes baying at the gates in the form of perennial famines, the Somali appeals to the Euro sense of humanity and asks to be fed. However, in defense of Bile, again from what Kiin has told her, he led a very active life before he became indisposed. A doctor in charge of a refuge. Not many of them about.

“Tea with biscuits in the living room?”

Changing scene, she brings the tea tray; he, coming after her and humming what she imagines to be a Somali song of the nationalistic variety, is already opening the wrappings of the crackling biscuits. Her gaze, wandering, rests for a few moments on a runic writing: “The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood.”

Whatever does that mean, she thinks. He offers her a biscuit; she pours out the tea. No sugar — she drinks her tea white; he drinks his as it comes, black.

A very long silence.

“About Bile,” he says, broaching the subject, with the compunction of someone to whom has fallen the unenviable task of looking after an ailing person.

Seamus tries his damnedest not to appear unnecessarily intrusive. Cambara waits for him to continue, convinced that he is about to launch into an explanation of what, in his view, is the matter. But he doesn’t, his eyes furtively focusing first on his watch and then on a spot to the right of her, maybe on a stain at the bottom of her dress that she has failed to clean up. Cambara supposes that he has picked up a faint sound coming from Bile’s room, the way a mother does when her baby is sleeping somewhere close, and, jumpy, he gets up and, without saying anything to her, paces back and forth, muttering something to himself, looking in the direction of Bile’s room, door closed, maybe waiting for confirmation of whether he has heard something or not.

His next move takes him to the sideboard, where he sets about laying a table in record time: three places, three plates, three table mats, crockery, water tumblers each with ice cubes and slices of lemon in them, and a large bottle of mineral water.

“Can I help?” she says timidly

“Just in case Bile wakes up.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“When he does wake up, I will want him to eat something, because I’ve assumed from having been in the kitchen while making tea that he hasn’t cooked and you haven’t prepared a meal for him.” Then, like a caregiver remarking on the habits of his ward, “That he is fretful in his sleep means that he is having a bad, bad day.”

Seamus walks into the kitchen, washes his hands, puts on an apron, fumbles about in the pantry, brings out and opens several tins containing soup and green peas, empties the contents into microwave containers, and, using gloves, sticks them in the microwave. He turns the cooker on; brings out onions, chopping and frying them in olive oil; opens a tin of tomatoes; turns and pulls out pans, spices, garlic; and voilà, an easy-to-make sauce in quick time. He lowers the flames so nothing burns, then joins her, takes a sip of his cold tea, frowns, and asks aloud if she might like a fresh pot. She offers to make it; he shrugs a don’t-bother shoulder shrug, and sits down, one part of him listening for a sound from Bile’s room, a second timing the oven and the sauce on the cooker, and a third attending to her. She finds herself remembering Dalmar as a baby and her early days as a mother.

“In what state did you find him?” Seamus asks.

“Lying amid his waste.”

“But he won’t listen.”

She won’t allow herself to ask the question “To what won’t he listen?” no matter how often she wants to; she is unable to voice her sentiments: “But you don’t ask someone in his state what to do, you just do it.” What’s more, she remembers her vow not to talk about what she saw to a living soul. She knows she has no choice but to leave the job of what to do, from now on, to those who have been close to him for much longer. She raises her head and, when she encounters Seamus’s expectant look, she turns away, evasive.

“It breaks my heart for you to have seen Bile in this sort of sorry state,” Seamus says. “I’ve known him for much longer, from when we were both in our early twenties, and he was a live wire then, bright, fun to be with. We spent the wonder that is youth together, in Padua. We were a threesome, Bile, Jeebleh, and me. Jeebleh came to visit us a couple of years ago, a visit that set off a tremor that became an earthquake. Death called, and Bile’s half-brother answered; then Raasta, Bile’s niece, and her Down’s-syndrome companion and playmate, Makka, to whom he was attached, left the country for schooling in Dublin, as did Shanta, Bile’s younger sister, and her husband, Faahiye. From then on, his emotional fix, especially since Raasta’s departure, has been one of sadness, marked by inactivity. He doesn’t want to practice medicine, his thinking has slowed down to a frightening pace, he has disturbed sleep, and the smallest things upset him. Much of this is set off by a childhood trauma, linked to his half-brother Caloosha killing his, Bile’s, father.”

Seamus falls silent, and, hearing no sound emanating from Bile’s room, he gathers the tea things and returns to the kitchen to do what’s necessary. He puts the food that is ready in bowls and comes back. “Sorry,” he says.