Nuruddin Farah - Knots

“He has spoken of his dreams, in which he wakes up dressed in a stranger’s clothes or dining with persons totally unknown to him,” Seamus says.

“Does he enjoy the meals?”

“Toward the end of these eat-until-you-can’t-eat-any-more occasions, he feels that they are cause for celebration, especially when he has a glimpse of you, better still when he meets you. Only you invariably arrive as he is about to depart, or you are seated in a place he cannot get to, because the path to you is inaccessible.”

“How does he respond?”

“In the dream, his anxiety goes haywire,” explains Seamus. “His highs and lows keep vacillating, his moods continue to seesaw. One moment he behaves normally, even if he finds himself in a stranger’s clothes and among people whom he does not know, and in the next instant he becomes unpredictable, he is irritable and gets into fights.”

“Very odd and worrying.”

“Bile strikes me as an adolescent falling in love for the first time. This, in a sense, is the case, considering that before he met you that one time, in the car, he never seemed capable of love. He is not a man to display his emotions. When he was younger, he was so self-controlled that he could choose not to show his affections toward a woman, say, and operate clandestinely instead, having affairs on the quiet. But they were never affairs of the heart — maybe brief relationships for companionship or just for the heck of it. I have known him for more than half his life; I know the man well, better than most.”

“Does anyone beside you know of any of this?”

“Dajaal does.”

“And what is Dajaal’s take?”

“When I’ve encouraged Bile to pursue the dictates of his heart, suggesting that he search you out, look you up, ring you up, fix an appointment with you, do something, do anything, Dajaal has opposed it.”

“On what basis?” She can hear the suspicion in her voice, and regrets it.

“Not on the basis of the clan business.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so.”

“Dajaal argues that this is no way for a man of Bile’s age to act, fall in love at first sight,” Seamus says. “You’ll know it more than I do, but Dajaal’s reaction is no different from the reactions of many a Somali, typical. They do not expect a man of Bile’s background and age to do certain things, even if he is sick with love.”

Cambara is tempted to tell Seamus that what she feels for Bile is not so very different, even though, because she is a woman, she might use different terms to describe her emotions, but she stops herself just before the words make their way out of their secret place, where she has hidden them ever since meeting Bile.

“There is another way of explaining Dajaal.”

“What’s that?” she asks.

Seamus says, “He is worried about the changes that your presence in Bile’s life will bring into their relationship and is afraid he will lose out, because you might decide to take him away to Canada. With you. You can imagine how much that would devastate him.”

It is at that instant that two things happen almost simultaneously: The phone rings, and Seamus answers it quickly, in an undertone, not wanting its squealing to wake Bile up. But then, just as suddenly, Bile comes into Cambara’s line of vision, leaning against the doorjamb, tall, very thin, his gaze conspiratorial, as if reminding her not to divulge their secret.

Seamus, unaware of Bile’s whereabouts, says to Cambara, “Dajaal is downstairs in the parking lot and is waiting to take you to your hotel, if that is where you want to go.”

Nodding, Cambara rises to her feet and then points her chin in Bile’s direction to alert Seamus of the new development. She takes long strides toward Bile, hugs him long and lovingly, and whispers a few private words in his ear.

She lets go and holds him at some distance, her lips trembling with the words that she struggles to flesh them out with sound. They look each other in the eye for a long while, neither moving nor saying anything, Cambara’s hands on Bile’s elbow. Then she turns away from him and waves to Seamus, thanking him for everything, promising to look him up. Then, with her head in a muddle, her legs almost failing to carry her away from the apartment, because she does not want to go, she hopes that she will find the parking lot, where Dajaal is waiting for her in the car.

“Don’t bother. I’ll see myself out,” she says, leaving.

Going down with no one to guide her out of the building, Cambara runs into a blind cat soon after bouncing down the stairway, two steps at a time. She comes almost to a superstitious impasse, and is tempted to go back, pick up the cat, and knock on the apartment door to make Bile and Seamus aware of its presence. She decides not to, and continues on her way down, determined to get to Dajaal fast.

She seems most herself when she thinks that she can adequately describe her own current mental state as turbulent, because she is at a crossroads where anything may happen: She could lose almost every major gain she has made at one single go or just as easily hold on to what she has won and procure more. This is the arbitrary character of civil war: wanton in its injustice, casual in the randomness of its violence. No law protects you; everything is in disorder. In great part, it is Dajaal who decides. In one manner or the other, all depends on him. He is now playing a role as significant as the one Zaak did in her first couple of days, as Kiin did for a while, Kiin who assisted her in planting her feet on terra firma. How is she to continue from here on?

She is reflecting on the nature of her agitation and whether she can do something about the inopportunity of Bile’s and her affections — as Dajaal seems to see it — when she not only loses her way in the labyrinth of her conflicting emotions but also follows the wrong fork in the footway leading down. She steps straight into the passageway ahead of her, having been misled by the unseasonable brightness of the sun at this hour, her mood so low that it is imposing a sinking feeling on her thinking. It occurs to her, after a short while, that she is actually walking away from the light into a narrow corridor that is darkening the farther she proceeds. She doubts if this pathway will eventually conduct her to the parking lot. Lo and behold, she has ended up in a basement.

Disoriented, as if she has walked into a cul-de-sac when she expected a throughway, she decides that the basement does not appear to have even a tenuous link to the upper portion of the building from where she has just come. Nothing makes sense to Cambara anymore. She knows that going forward, when she has no idea where she might end up, is no option worth pursuing, but then backtracking in hope of retracing her steps and finding Bile and Seamus’s apartment does not sound appealing either. She feels she is at the center of a storm of her own making, she, the unseeing eye.

Her head fills with childhood memories, above all her intimate conversations with the echoing darkness late at night in a house faintly ringing with the depth of a predawn silence. Now that she is much older, grieving for her dead son and trying to build an alternative to the life she shared with Wardi, not to speak of the false life her mother had imposed on her, she does what she used to do as a child to fend off the oncoming feeling of fear. She improvises a song of her own composition and hums a half-remembered tune. After which, she repeats to herself some of her favorite lyrics, “Hello, darkness, my old friend.” The phrase caresses her lips, stirring and activating them with pleasant remembrances. Her heart beats frenziedly fast, her mind active in its effort to freeze-frame the memory into an image: that of a child in tacit dialogue with daytime darkness, reminiscent of an eclipse suddenly descending on the cosmos with Stygian blackness. But where is she? And what manner of basement is this? Will someone kindly lend her the wick of a candle?