Nuruddin Farah - Knots

“Why are you sorry this time?”

He doesn’t speak directly, because he goes to the kitchen, fetches the food, and lays it out on the table, maybe waiting for Bile to emerge. In her imagining, Seamus is apologetic because he has probably entertained the vision of Bile and Cambara talking and getting to know each other. Maybe he thinks that she is good for him, that he likes her enough to share Bile with her as a friend. Maybe Seamus believes that she might inspire Bile sufficiently to brighten his dark days, liven up his lethargic hours, and banish his pessimism. Maybe he had hoped that Bile would benefit from her company until he became too exhausted to stay up. Or perhaps he finds his own prying into their private conversation invasive. He comes back and he sits.

“Sorry I was not around when you got here.”

“What matters is that you are here now.”

Seamus’s eyes are dimming, Cambara supposes, from the strenuous effort of concentrating on several things at the same time. Also, something is disturbing him, for he is looking around as if someone has changed the position of the furniture in the apartment, his gaze traveling from one item to another, his nose seemingly active, busy trying to identify the foreign odor. Earlier, she remembers him focusing on a stain at the bottom of her caftan; now he is zeroing in on a blotch on the top end of the chair farthest from him, his nose twitching in the disturbed attitude of a house-proud person discovering a blemish where there oughtn’t to be any. He gets up quickly, as if driven by the anxiety to isolate the culprit chair, quarantining it in its own corner to be dealt with later, but he makes a point of not looking in her direction, lest she assume that he is blaming her for it.

“Had I known?” he says, as he takes his seat.

She looks deep into his eyes, as she says, “You were doing more useful jobs in our family house than I could ever dream of undertaking. I am most indebted to you.”

“Did you see him take any pills?”

“No. What pills does he take?”

“He is irregular about the antidepressants he ingests,” Seamus explains. “He takes a combination of drug therapy: some when he is in a dejected mood, others when he suffers from an abrupt onset, yet others when he is working on a quick-recovery plan. When he is regular, he eats fluoxetine. I know that Dajaal rang him to inform him of your visit, and although I have nothing to go on, I am guessing that to prepare himself for it, he took imipramine, administering the intramuscular injection himself. This may have resulted in his body’s excessive reaction to the drug. He has a large store of medication. I’ve known him to take enuretic tablets — you know, they are for bed-wetters — saved from the days when he ran the clinic at The Refuge.”

“He belongs in a hospital,” she says.

“Not here. A hospital in Europe or America.”

“I agree with you.”

“I’ve proposed to fly him to Nairobi, for a start, and from there somewhere else. He won’t hear of it.”

“A great pity. Such a waste.”

Seamus says, “He has been having a terrible time of late and won’t even hear of us hiring a twenty-four-hour nurse or of considering consulting doctors outside the country. Up in the early part of the day, functioning reasonably well; in the latter part, down in the depth of a well as dark as it is damp and worrying. Clinical depression of the worst sort.”

All she can say is “I had no idea.”

“It will be said of him — if something is to happen to him, God forbid — that he has made a deliberate effort to mess up his life, like a man willing his own slow death.”

“Is he in a position to know?”

“Why does he avoid taking his pills for the longest time possible and then eat them by the fistful, dozens and dozens of them, well beyond the normal dose?” Seamus says.

“A death wish.”

“I attribute this to the well of his bottomless sorrow, which the years have dug in and around him, and which no words can describe, it is so deep,” Seamus says. “In addition to the childhood trauma of his half-brother murdering his dad, I trace his indisposition — here comes my psychobabble, if you can bear it — to his decades-long detention in inhumane conditions, the worst of it caused by his being kept in total isolation. You may not know that he spent years in isolation after being given a life sentence for opposing the tyrannical regime, whose misrule led to the civil war. It was no accident that the prison gates were opened, this coinciding with the flight of the then dictator in an army tank, a tactic encouraged by armed militiamen at the command of a certain general, who just happened to be a clansman of Bile’s and who eventually became a warlord with his own fiefdom in the divided city, the southern part of which went to him and the north to another warlord. Anyhow, the tyrant’s fall happened to coincide with Bile gaining his freedom, the birth of Raasta, his niece, and the collapse of the state. To all intents and purposes, it appeared as if he had pulled through, put his memories of his worst years behind him, once he set up The Refuge and ran it with incredible devotion. This act of supreme ingenuity served to hold several of his sides together, enabling him to be close to his niece and her playmate, Makka, and his sister, each of them contributing to the rationale behind The Refuge and Bile’s well-being. You would have appreciated it if you had come in its heyday or even just before the idea of its irrelevance began to become clear, soon after Jeebleh’s visit.”

Cambara raises her eyebrows, asking a number of unspoken questions about Jeebleh: Who? What? Why?

Seamus’s moment of hesitation prolongs itself into a minute of stillness, his mouth slightly ajar but not issuing a sound.

Seamus goes on, “You see, it was a couple of years after he set up The Refuge that Bile and I linked up and, together, made things work and pretty well, I would say. We created our own paradise in a country that had gone to hell, a country with little hope of ever recovering from a state of total reliance on handouts from the international community. We did what we could then to assist in providing a rationale to disarm the militias through training them at a younger age and weaning them from glorifying the gun. But there was — there is — need for more universal commitments; no do-gooders can do as much as it will take to reconstruct the country’s infrastructure, reorient the people of this nation so they might find their proper bearing and help them to reestablish the state on a viable footing. Boring rhetoric, boring politics, yes, but the truth is that the political class has failed this country. Nor can you speak intelligently about Somalia or for that matter about Bile or Jeebleh or Dajaal without the wholesale condemnation of the cowardly intellectual class too.”

Silent, Cambara thinks that not many people have eyes like Seamus’s, which are like a falcon’s: alert to an impending peril, darting in several directions in the time it takes you to blink just once. Now she watches him stare straight ahead, his mind elsewhere and mulling over things. Cambara wonders if she is correct in interpreting his expression as rueful or as just plain hangdog, in that he has been lacking in humility, having stressed his contribution to his friend’s wellness more than he likes.

“Lately, however, since your arrival, actually his ups have been mightily high and his downs terribly down, highs and lows, which have brought us closer to despair.”

Cambara is surprised to hear that she plays such a role — though perhaps not too surprised, given the prominent role Bile has played in her imagination, and especially now that she is convinced without evidence to go on that Bile has been involved with reclaiming her property. “How do they manifest, these changes?”