Nuruddin Farah - Knots

Cambara wonders what impression she will make on Arda, on Zaak, on Dajaal, on Kiin, above all on Bile, if they hear of it: the first time Bile and Seamus acquiesce to her request that she see herself out and they oblige, she loses her way. In a basement of all places. To the best of her memory, no one has ever spoken of shadowed forests hereabouts, definitely not in the center of an ancient city that has been under civil war siege for some ten-plus years. But where has she gotten to? Might it be that she is conjuring it all up out of an eagerness to be with Bile? She is no doubt anxious about the sightless cat too, a good enough ruse to excuse her knocking on Bile and Seamus’s apartment door and saying, “Isn’t it funny I can’t seem to go away from you? Fancy finding an eyeless cat going down and then losing my way in a forest, most likely, of my own manufacture. Here, do let’s feed her. A saucer for her milk, please. And I will need a mattress on the floor to crash on.” Then she’ll stay. But how much further will such tactics take her?

In her attempt to get a good hold of herself, Cambara reminds herself how, in a number of children’s stories, among them Pinocchio, children who do not follow the set paths and knowingly or even mischievously stray away from them often meet with terrible consequences: Alice in Wonderland, in which the principal character goes down a rabbit hole; and C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, in which Lucy and then the others pass through an open-ended wardrobe and, as their story progresses, try to grow the necessary will and strength to overcome impossible difficulties. Is her own adventure one that is to equal theirs? Does it mean that something awful, something disagreeable is about to happen to her for being naughty, and, if so, what form will this take? What has she done to deserve this punishment? The blind cat? Does her present misfortune emanate from her stubborn refusal to attend to the needy animal? Did she expend energy and goodwill on cleaning up Bile because she is returning a favor and investing in him? Did she help Bile undress so he could shower and then wash his dirty clothes for the same reason? A blind cat is a blind cat; what can it do for her? And what endearments, to which only the two of them are privy, did she whisper in Bile’s ear before leaving?

There are protean qualities to her current worries, which alternately take the shape of a fear that keeps pounding on the door to her brain or of one that she can now trace to a childhood memory. In her recall, she goes truant, and, instead of coming home, being a latchkey child on some of the afternoons when her parents returned late, she follows a road show. Then, just as she prepares to take a longer route home — not wanting to meet Zaak, alone at home, because he has seen her kiss another boy, a classmate, and she is fearful he might tease her — Cambara pawns her wristwatch for money to buy a ticket to watch the late matinee circus. She knows she will not come home until dark, but that does not seem to worry her either.

As it happens, her mother is about to organize a search party — in those days, not many households had telephones — and her father is about to go to the nearest police station and report her as missing, when she lets herself in with her key. Coming in from the dark outside into the part of the house where a bulb is burning bright, she looks like an alley cat that has just fled from a fight with a raft of foxes.

Now, mysteriously, the darkness of the night lifts all of a sudden, and the basement is ablaze with light, as if there were a skylight. Cambara hears her name called several times, and she follows the sound. Eventually, she emerges into the evening twilight and the flight of outside steps. She finds Dajaal waiting and saying, “Where have you been?”

Because she cannot herself explain where she has been, why or what has made her take the wrong fork in the road — if that is what she has done, and she doubts it — she keeps quiet, saying nothing, afraid that he might think her mad. She walks past him and gets into the car, using the front door, which she has found open. It does not make sense to blame it all on her bad sense of direction.

Just before moving, he asks, “Where?”

She says, “To the family property.”

“Not to the hotel?”

“Later,” she says. “Let’s pick up my boys.”

He starts the engine and lets it idle, his hand resting on his chin as though he is considering several choices available to him. Then he changes gears and moves speechlessly, as if saying what is on his mind will amount to nothing more than wasted breath.

She wishes she had the gumption to ask him what he thinks about Bile’s dreams, which she suspects that Seamus will have shared with him. How might Dajaal interpret the dream in which Bile is in a stranger’s clothes? For she has been in his, Bile’s, when washing her own and waiting for them to dry. And if she had come out at Seamus’s reentry into the apartment as he called out her name, he might have thought of the dream as uncanny fortuity, mightn’t he?

There comes a stage in every story, Cambara reflects, when the protagonist is alone, afraid, worried, too exhausted, or too hungry to continue. Perhaps she has reached that point in her story. Is this why she is feeling queasy?

In the car, Dajaal driving, eyes focused on the road, she sits upright, looking ahead of herself, her hands in her lap, her fingers entwined, the thumb and middle fingers twirling her wedding ring, as if she is trying to remove it. She is having difficulties doing so, because it is too tight, the ring having set into the flesh around it and the joint having grown bigger over the years. She feels that she has come to the point in the story when the protagonist has changed from one state of being and hasn’t made the full circle in which the metamorphosis is complete. She is lonely, fearful, and begins to envisage feeding on hunger itself.

Dajaal says, “My turn has come to thank you.”

“Why is that?”

Turning to her, almost touching her thigh with his half-extended hand and withdrawing it just in time, he repeats, “Thank you.”

Surprised, she asks, “What have I done?”

He replies, “Seamus told me when I called a few minutes ago on the phone about what you’ve done for Bile. We’re both touched and very grateful to you. You’ve been exceptionally kind. Seamus describes you as a woman with a noble spirit, and he commends you. So do I.”

“The pleasure to have been of small assistance has been mine,” she says. “Not that I’ve done much, to be honest with you.”

She observes, when she studies his face, that the heat mixed with emotion has made the veins on Dajaal’s forehead stand out, so that they resemble serpents crisscrossed with deep furrows. How the years have plowed the fields of his head, leaving only thin wisps of hair with a lot of pluck.

“As for the masks, the props for your play?”

She sits forward. “Yes?”

“I’ve given the matter serious thought,” he says. “You won’t have anything to worry about. You produce your play the way you like it, and I will support you and provide you with adequate security for as long as it is in production.”

Has someone else spoken to him to make him change his mind? If so, who? Bile can’t have done it; he was in no condition from the moment Dajaal dropped her off until he came to pick her up. Unless they talked in the period between the moment she left the apartment and said her good-bye to Seamus and Bile, traversed the passageways of the basement, and met up with Dajaal. It is all very confusing. How long could she have been in the basement? Couldn’t have been half an hour. Whoever did it, someone suggested that Dajaal reconsider his opposition to the use of the masks and moderate his views. Who? She has no idea. Does Dajaal’s shift of position warrant her worry? The thought of it and what would happen if he did change it yet again gives her the shakes. She hopes that she will muddle through and come out the other end in one solid piece.