Crossbones

17

THE NEWS ABOUT THE RAID BY ETHIOPIAN AIRCRAFT ON TWO OF Mogadiscio’s airports comes early in the afternoon of December 26, an hour after an African Union delegation flew out of the country. It spreads like the wildest of fires. One couldn’t help hearing it: the local radios broadcast it; total strangers meeting for the first time stop and chat about its consequences. Malik is in the workroom, licking a piece into shape, and doesn’t hear of it until Dajaal calls him up. He thinks it is a risky action undertaken in broad daylight, by cocky men confident that they would get away with it. Somalis assumed they had in part the military intelligence garnered by the United States from the unmanned drones in the skies to thank for it.

“There were no fatalities as such in either attack,” Dajaal says. “However, I hear that a young goatherd was hurt.”

“What was the herder doing when he was hit?”

“He was pursuing one of his goats, which had strayed off the footpath and gone under the gaps in the airport security fence to graze,” Dajaal explains. “My informant says that the beasts were close to the apron of the runway and he had barely chased the goat back when shrapnel from one of the bombs hit his side. It killed the goat.”

Malik says, “Poor thing.”

“The greatest casualty is neither the goat nor the boy who is hurt, but our national pride,” Dajaal says. “The big mouths from the Courts, from TheSheikh down to the foot soldiers, feel no shame in provoking the bullies next door and exposing our vulnerabilities. Why talk big when you haven’t the means, militarily, to defend the country?”

Malik senses Dajaal’s anger. He prepares for an “I told you so” tirade, but Dajaal spares him that. After all, they are in agreement.

“How are you feeling, anyway?” Malik asks.

“I can’t afford to be sick at such an hour, I am in such a rage,” Dajaal says. “I am the proverbial man who chokes on water and doesn’t know what else to drink. I am murderously annoyed with the men from the Courts and woeful, albeit homicidal, when I think about the raid.”

Malik is of two minds whether to repeat Fee-Jigan’s incrimination of Gumaad as an intelligence officer posing as a journalist when Dajaal inquires how his interview went. He thinks better of it, deciding that it no longer matters what Gumaad does for a job, since he won’t excel at it. Malik will remain cordial but distant. He doesn’t wish to make an enemy of Gumaad unnecessarily, since Gumaad can cause him much harm; all he has to do is heighten BigBeard’s sense of paranoia and denounce Malik as an agent of the U.S. imperialists pretending to be a journalist. A journalist covering Somalia and holding a foreign passport must be careful what he wishes for.

He wishes Jeebleh were here. Neither he nor Ahl has responded to Malik’s recent messages.

He channel-surfs, watching the news on the BBC and CNN in English; on Al Jazeera in Arabic; the BBC in Somali; then back to Al Jazeera, and finishing on the BBC. Apparently, between the time Jeebleh left and the bombing of the runway by the Ethiopian jets, a high-powered Arab League delegation on a fact-finding mission had taken off, and less than an hour later, a ten-man delegation from the Courts had returned from Eritrea. Local print and radio journalists had reportedly gone to the airport to interview the Arab League envoy before he departed for Cairo, and then waited on the tarmac to put their questions to the two most quotable members of the Courts delegation. Eritrea, Ethiopia’s number-one enemy, is the principal ally of the Courts and the supplier of its weapons.

In his desire to know more, Malik tries Fee-Jigan, Gumaad, and several others. All to no avail, because their mobile phones are either busy or unavailable.

Cambara, who probably knows less than he does, is the first to call him — not to give him news, but to say that he is welcome to call or come whenever he is down, when he wants to reconnect, or when he is too tired to eat his own cooking, and to share a gossip or a laugh.

Sweetness, on occasion, brings out the bitterness in one. Malik starts to whine. “Everyone’s phone is busy, or they do not answer.”

“How has your day been otherwise?”

Malik gives her a rundown of his unsuccessful encounter with Ma-Gabadeh and then mentions that he has learned of the attack on the airports from Dajaal. Malik adds, “Gumaad claims he is to be appointed as the Courts’ spokesman, and intimated he was off to meet up with TheSheikh, and to prepare a strongly worded statement about Ethiopia’s moves along the border.”

“Rather too late for that, I should think.”

“Still, there is a need for a communiqué.”

She asks, “Has Gumaad been of any use to you?”

Malik says, “Every bee with honey on its tongue has a sting in its tail and therefore its numerous uses. But not as much as I hoped.”

“What are you saying?” she asks.

Then he tells her about his encounter with Fee-Jigan and repeats the journalist’s incrimination of Gumaad as an intelligence officer. “I can’t, I won’t trust him anymore.”

Cambara says, “It could be that because Dajaal, Bile, and I focused on Robleh, the snake in our midst, we missed the venomous spider. Have you shared this with Dajaal?”

“I thought he might take it badly.”

“Anyhow, I don’t think you need to worry anymore,” Cambara says. “My suspicion is that TheSheikh and all the Courts’ big shots, including TheOtherSheikh, will be fleeing the city in advance of the invading Ethiopians. Not one of them will relish falling into enemy hands or being taken prisoner and flown to Guantánamo for interrogation.”

“I wish I could interview TheSheikh now.”

Cambara, who is in a no-love-lost mood about the Courts, says, “TheSheikh won’t be in any mood to chat to a nephew. I bet he won’t stick around a second longer than necessary.”

Malik imagines the robed men on the run as night falls, alive to the fact that defeat exposes them to ridicule, that their fair-weather friends will leave them to their own devices the second they lose power. Refuge will be difficult to find. One doesn’t need to have read Machiavelli to know the tight spot the men of the Courts are in when or if the Ethiopians occupy Mogadiscio.

He asks Cambara, “How’s Bile taking it?”

“To date, he is not aware of what has happened.”

Malik, in his head, titles his article, “Sheikhs on the Run.” Then he itches most furiously, as if a battalion of lice is advancing on him. He is so itchy he is tempted to suggest that they talk later.

But Cambara goes on. “This isn’t an ideal country for someone on the run, especially if they are planning to stage a comeback, guerrilla style. There are no forests thick enough to hide a contingent of fighters preparing a hit-and-run attack, except in Lower Juba. TheSheikh won’t dare cross into Kenya.”

“Why not?”

“The Kenyans will hand him over to you-know-who.”

“Why not take to the sea?”

She says, “You’d be surprised to know that even many coastal Somalis, born and bred in cities and towns on the sea, never learn to swim, or eat fish.”

“Pirates not knowing how to swim? It’s bizarre.”

“It’s strange but true,” she says.

“I hear the Courts have planned a comeback.”

She says, “Lately, the Bakhaaraha rumor mills have been abuzz with sightings of Shabaab cadres ‘consecrating’ people’s properties with a view toward using them as bases from which they intend to launch their attacks on the Ethiopian forces invading or occupying Mogadiscio. Remember how the Republican Guard melted into the suburbs of Baghdad in the days of the U.S. invasion, and how they organized their comeback in a few weeks, with deadly results?”

“Is the plan afoot to do like the Iraqis?”

“They are planning a comeback.”

“What will the cadres of the Courts do with the houses they are, as you put it, consecrating?”

“I’ve been told by a man related to my maid who is in the arms business that Shabaab have already moved heavy weapons into the houses they’ve consecrated,” Cambara says. She goes on, “In fact, on the very day of your arrival, I met a young thing I suspected was on his way to set up such a safe house.”

Malik, taking notes, presses her to recall all the details she remembers about the encounter. But just as they get started, she says, “Wait, wait,” and when she comes back on the line, she says, “Bile is calling me. Bye, I must go. But, really, you must come and stay with us. You’ll be safer here.”

“Let me think it over.”

“Please come. It’ll be good to have you around.”

And when she hangs up, he remembers how often his wife interrupted her telephone conversations to attend to their daughter’s crying. He reminds himself to phone home and say that he is well and safe.

All the major news agencies quote the Ethiopian government spokesman justifying, in a brief statement, the bombing of the two airports in Mogadiscio. “We attacked the airports so that no unauthorized aircraft may land at either runway in response to acts of aggression from the Courts.”

Nothing sums up the foolishness better than the declaration the Courts’ defense spokesman makes, when he vows that Allah is on the side of the Courts and it is his intention to lead an invasion into Ethiopia and to defeat the army of infidels. He says, “I promise that with God’s will, the Army of the Faithful will conquer Ethiopia in less than three weeks, and it being Ramadan, the holy month, we will break our fast in Addis Ababa.”

By all accounts, Malik thinks, this was the communiqué that had been fired ahead of the bullets. Here is where no-brainers meet clichés, where clichés make their acquaintance with lies, and where falsehood and hyperbole pile up, pyramidlike, until one can’t tell the truth from a lie.

He sits on the balcony jotting down his notes, his mobile phone by his side, when he hears the muezzin’s afternoon call. A monsoon rain in the form of a brief, localized drizzle is drenching the ground below him. Malik feels it when a single, huge drop wets his forehead, the moisture spreading. On impulse, he decides to step out of the apartment alone and head in the direction of the neighborhood mosque. He wants to get there in time for the after-prayer sermon.

Malik remembers traveling with a handful of Afghans crossing hostile territory into Pakistan. He was impressed with how these illiterate men mapped their exit out of Afghanistan and then back into it after doing whatever job took them there. Another time, he spent eight weeks with Rwandan commandos tracking a Hutu génocidaire. But he wonders if he is cut out for a visit to the mosque, where assassins may lie in wait. Still, at a mosque he should be inconspicuous. And mosques, as Jeebleh told him, are the nerve center, the ideal place to take the nation’s pulse on a day such as this; mosques are the key with which to unlock the country’s amped-up politics.

He changes into a sarong, a plain shirt twice his size, a shawl, and a cheap pair of sandals. Out of the apartment, he follows a group of men headed toward the mosque, talking, their conversation touching on the bombing. There is something unmistakably “alien” about his gait as he compares his way of walking to that of the other men: his stride is paced, his look averted, and not wanting to step into a hole or stumble against the rocks and debris scattered here and there, he lifts his feet carefully. He smiles sheepishly when his eyes encounter someone else’s. He murmurs the Somali greeting “Nabad” to everyone he passes, and each answers, giving the full complement of the greeting in Arabic: “Wacalaykumus Salaam.”

The buildings on either side of the mosque are boarded up, with the odd door open, showing goats in full domicile there, their dry dung strewn like raisins. He holds back for a moment when he comes to the entrance, where a number of men are performing communal ablutions. Then he joins a queue at the standpipes, and begins to banter with a man about the day’s events.

The man says, “I was told there were four planes. One of them dropped the bombs, and the other three were American planes showing it the way.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Someone reliable assured me there were four.”

Another man contributes his bit. He says, “Yes, four planes. One on either side of the jet, the third leading the way to the airport, the fourth following.”

Malik asks, “Leading the way? Where? How?”

“They are idiots, these Ethiopians,” the man says. “I went to school in that country and know them very well. You see, they wouldn’t know how to find their way anywhere, not even to hell, unless you pointed them in the right direction.”

“And to whom did the other planes belong?”

“To the enemy of Islam.”

“Who is that, specifically?”

“The Americans, of course.”

The interior of the mosque is simply furnished; the ceiling is high, and there is plenty of space all around, with columns and pillars separating the prayer hall into uneven sections. Pushed and shoved, Malik is facing an impediment in the shape of a column as he joins one of the middle rows. As the faithful “purpose to offer up to Allah only,” toward Mecca, he whispers the words of the prayer, inclining his head and body, with his hands on his knees, now saying, “Allah hears him who praises him,” with his nose and then his forehead touching the floor, now prostrating, now kneeling. His knees hurt — he needs to pray more often, he tells himself, in the absence of a gym, and God will bless him more. His left foot bent under him, he sits on it, his hands on his knees. How excruciating the pain!

At the close of the prayer and the supplication, described as the marrow of worship, Malik is surprised that no one gives a sermon condemning the invasion. People just go their different ways, singly or in groups. Those that remain offer more prayers, while others gather outside and talk in low voices, seemingly unprepared to admit him, a total stranger, into their midst. Of course, they are talking about the attack, but they do not sound sufficiently incensed to make their feelings known.

Dispirited, because he hoped a visit to the mosque might supply him with better material, Malik returns home.

As he lets himself into the apartment, his phone rings: it is Jeebleh, inquiring if he is all right. “For a moment, you had me worried,” says his father-in-law. “I kept ringing and no answer. What’s happened, and where have you been?”

“I’ve been out, and left my phone behind.”

“Out where? Dajaal has no idea where you are.”

“I’ve been at the mosque.”

“Whatever have you been doing at a mosque?”

Malik is tempted to say, “What else do you do at a mosque except pray?” but stops himself just in time, out of respect for his father-in-law. Instead, he tells him he went to the house of prayer to take a measure of the mood in the country, as Jeebleh himself had advised. “I must have gone to the wrong mosque, because nothing unusual happened on this unusual day, the first of its kind in the annals of Somalia,” he says.

“There is no wrong mosque,” Jeebleh says.

“But you know what I mean.”

“You chose the wrong day,” Jeebleh tells him. “If you go to a mosque on a Friday, you are likely to hear an earful of condemnation from the pulpit.”

“What’s been the reaction in Kenya?” Malik asks.

“There is an air of incredulity here.”

“No communiqué from the Kenyan government?”

“None so far as I know,” replies Jeebleh. Then he says, “Wait,” and Malik can hear him saying to a hotel maid, “I do not want my bed turned down. I am in it, can’t you see?” Then he hears the slamming of a door, and Jeebleh is back on the line. “I’ve read the two interviews.”

“I’ve just finished the draft of another.”

“I loved them.”

“Thank you,” says Malik. “I appreciate hearing that.”

“I’ve spoken to Bile and Cambara, too.”

“I had a long, rambling chat with Cambara myself,” says Malik.

Jeebleh says, “They suggest you move in.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Jeebleh asks, “Do you want to hear my opinion?”

“I always like to hear your opinion.”

“I would move in with them if I were you.”

From where he is, the sky is streaked with orange clouds, turning brighter as the sunlight strikes them from several angles. The twilight is formidably picturesque, and Malik wishes he had the knack for photography.

“I’ll call home and talk to Amran,” Malik says.

The offer to telephone home is a masterstroke. It frees Malik from having to continue the conversation with Jeebleh, just as it reminds both that he will not consider moving in with Bile and Cambara, because it may upset his wife, who, they know, has the tendency to be raving jealous, no matter what she says. A spouse in denial is a difficult spouse.

Jeebleh says, “Do that,” and hangs up.

The phone has barely rung a second time when Judith answers. Sweet and gentle, she speaks fast, saying that they are all well. Then she says, “Here is Amran. Bye for now. Love!”

Malik sweetens his words as best he can. “Hi, my dear, my darling, how are things? I miss you and miss my little one, too.”

Amran is in a foul mood. “When are you coming home?”

He says foolishly, “The airports are closed.”

Amran is furious that he has stayed behind instead of leaving Mogadiscio when her father did. When she is cross, she shouts; when jealous, she weeps; when loving, she is the sweetest thing there is. Amran has moods. Today, she is in a miasma of rage, she can’t stop screaming. Malik holds the phone away from his ear and listens without interrupting. Her parents often shake their heads in sympathy with Malik, and say to each other, “But you know what she’s like.”

Amran is now saying at the top of her lungs, “The war has started — the foretaste of terrible battles to come. We’re all worried sick about you. And all you can tell me is that the airports are closed. What’s gotten into you?”

Malik says, “I am doing well, writing.”

“I don’t wish to raise an orphan on my own.”

“What are you talking about? What orphan?”

“I want you to come home now,” Amran orders.

“As I explained, the airports are closed.”

“Then there is no point talking, is there?”

“But there is a point in talking, my love.”

“You’ve always been unreliable when it comes to timekeeping, always untrustworthy when it comes to phoning and letting me know where you are and what you are up to or who you are with. Work, work, work. Women, more admiring women, eating out of your palms the words of your wisdom. Who are you with now? What’s her name? Why have a family if you work, work, and work? Why marry if you only want to entertain other women? While we wait for a word from you. While I worry how to raise an orphan on my own.”

“Listen to me, honey,” he pleads.

“Don’t call me honey,” she shouts back.

And, weeping, she hangs up on him. In a day or two, she will deny ever having said any of these things.

No more writing today, for sure. Knowing Amran, he may not be able to do any work the next day, either. She is a spoiler when she is unhappy, even if she also takes pride when Malik’s work is in the limelight, earning praise or a prize.

Unable to think lucidly enough to write, Malik calls Nairobi to plead with Jeebleh to intercede; no answer. When his own phone rings and rings — maybe the journalists he has been attempting to contact are now returning his calls — Malik doesn’t answer it. He takes to his bed, his heart heavy.

He gets up early and watches a series of pointless reality TV programs, involving housemates from a number of African countries living in an isolated house, with each contestant trying to avoid being evicted by viewers who have the power to vote him or her out. The last to be evicted receives a large cash prize at the end.