Crossbones

2

JEEBLEH WALKS GROGGILY OUT OF THE FOKKER AIRCRAFT, JUST arrived in Mogadiscio from Nairobi, and down the wobbly steps pushed against its flank by a gaggle of youths who look like a prison work detail. As he descends, billows of dust mixed with the midday heat and humidity whip up at him in agitated vigor, the sea breeze from a mere half kilometer away hardly affecting the gooeyness of the amalgam. In addition, an irritating scrimmage of human traffic crowds the bottom of the stairway as porters squeeze through the descending passengers to offer their services.

Jeebleh is visiting Mogadiscio for the first time in a decade. His son-in-law, Malik, a freelance journalist based in New York, has come along, too, intending to write articles about the ancestral land he has never seen. Now, watching half a dozen bearded men in white robes with whips in their hands, Malik looks disturbed. Born in Aden, Yemen, of a Somali father and a Malay-Chinese mother, Malik was brought up partly in Malaysia, a most orderly country. He learned Somali as a child but has not spoken it continuously, and because of this, his hearing cannot accommodate the alien harshness of these bearded men’s inflections as they bark instructions at passengers and porters alike. Jeebleh remembers his wife’s refrain about Somalia: “That unfortunate country, cursed with those dreadful clanspeople, forever killing one another and everyone around them.” Yet it is Judith, prone as she is to speaking out of turn and making embarrassing gaffes, who suggested that Jeebleh take Malik along and prevailed on their daughter, Amran, to give her consent.

Now Jeebleh and Malik have become separated in the melee, as the passengers shove one another in the rush to collect their luggage or to get out of the way. Jeebleh steps aside and holds out his hand for Malik, in the manner in which one stretches out a hand to a drowning person. Malik acknowledges him with a nod and a smile, but declines to take the proffered hand, so Jeebleh inches his way through the crowd to rejoin him. “Let us head in the direction of the Immigration and Customs down there,” he shouts in English, and he points at the hall, his hand striking someone in the face, an act for which he apologizes, although the man whom he has struck does not appear at all bothered.

A man, seemingly in authority, even though he is not in uniform — he is one of those wearing a white robe, Arab style, and a purple keffiyeh, Arafat style, but no whip — takes interest in the two of them when he hears them communicate in English. He approaches with the consummate confidence of the powerful, his hand outstretched toward Jeebleh. “Your passport, please.”

Malik mutters conspiratorially to Jeebleh, wondering who the man is. Instead of answering the question, Jeebleh hands over his passport and then, turning to Malik, suggests that he cede his own. The man studies the passports, one at a time. When he has gleaned as much information as he can, he returns them, politely gesturing them on toward Immigration and Customs. Jeebleh’s Somali seventh sense alerts him to some trouble ahead, even if he does not know its nature. But he takes care not to share his worry with Malik.

The terminal building is open on the side facing the airstrip and the ocean, and closed on the other, exit side. The airport reopened to traffic only a couple of months earlier, for the first time in sixteen civil war years. The repair job on the hall is not quite done, the scaffolding crisscrossing and impeding one’s movements, nor is the work on the archways anywhere near complete. A rope is strung across the middle of the hall, separating arrivals and departures. In the departures area, some fifty or so cheap white plastic chairs are clustered in the corner, presumably for the use of passengers waiting to board their flights. In arrivals, a disorderly queue is forming as the first passengers scramble to clear the formalities. With no luggage carousels or carts, no trained personnel at Immigration and Customs, there is no knowing how things might pan out, no knowing what these robed, bearded men might or might not do.

Jeebleh and Malik start their own queue; apparently they are the only arriving passengers traveling on non-Somali passports. They are linked in intention, too. Malik wants to write about the city under the Union of Islamic Courts as it prepares for war. As a freelancer, he has signed a loose contract with a daily newspaper back home that gives it first right of refusal to any piece he writes. In return, the paper has given him a small retainer, from which he paid for his ticket to Somalia. But he is aware of the dangers involved in visiting the country; and knows, too, that his accompanying Jeebleh has pleased his father-in-law and eased his wife Amran’s mind. For his part, Jeebleh intends to facilitate Malik’s mission by introducing him to his bosom friend, Bile. Jeebleh and Bile were raised in the same household, their mothers almost interchangeable. Later, they went to Padua University together, Bile to take a medical degree, Jeebleh to write his doctoral thesis on Dante. They were even together in jail back in Somalia, where as political dissidents they occupied neighboring solitary cells. But now they live thousands of miles apart, and Jeebleh has heard that Bile’s health is poor. He is eager to see his old friend, and to meet Bile’s companion, Cambara, who has insisted they act as his and Malik’s hosts in Mogadiscio. There are others to whom he can introduce his son-in-law, who will help him to adjust to his challenging surroundings.

Yet for all his good intentions, Jeebleh’s anxiety about Malik’s well-being is taking a toll on him, as he labors to anticipate the troubles that may arise, in hopes of allaying them. It doesn’t help that Malik is already ill at ease with Jeebleh’s solicitude. Having been a foreign correspondent in the Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other of the world’s hot spots, he appears certain he needs no telling what he must or mustn’t do. Within half an hour of arriving in Somalia, the two of them are already erring on the side of reticence, neither saying what is on his mind.

The sight of a young man in his late teens reminds Malik of his nephew, Taxliil, who has recently disappeared from Minnesota, along with other Somali-American youths. Taxliil and the missing youths have reportedly gone to Somalia as volunteers in the ranks of Shabaab fighters. Ahl, Malik’s older brother, will be coming to Somalia within a few days as well, in search of his runaway stepson. Unlike Jeebleh and Malik, Ahl will base himself in Puntland, the autonomous state notorious in the international media for its pirate hideouts. Malik remembers Jeebleh explaining that in the absence of verifiable reports in Somalia, given its statelessness, all one has to do is to circulate a kutiri-kuteen hearsay not traceable to any particular person, and you can be sure that once the word hits the street it will grow its own legs and will, in its wanderings, recruit more and more hearers, with each new hearer adding their bit to the roaming tale until it gains more speed and runs faster than truth. Now things are such that Taxliil is on the verge of being sent to Puntland, serving as a go-between from a top man in Shabaab to the pirates. Malik and Jeebleh intend to assist in tracking down Taxliil’s movements in any way they can. With Jeebleh’s extensive contacts in the city and the links Malik intends to forge with other journalists and whomever else he meets, they are confident they will find Taxliil.

Malik’s skin is smarting from the sand now blowing from the sea, the breeze bearing more than a touch of salt; he is ceaselessly rubbing his eyes sore with the heel of his hand. The same white-robed man with the purple keffiyeh opens a window in the Customs cubicle and, after a payment of a visa fee of twenty U.S. dollars, stamps their passports, not a single word exchanged. Even so, Jeebleh’s Somali seventh sense will not settle down.

They pick up their suitcases. Another white-robed man, this one with a single-tailed whip in his hand, asks if they have anything to declare. Jeebleh responds that they do not. The man says, “Welcome to the country,” and adds, “Godspeed.”

As soon as they are out of the building, Jeebleh starts across the no-man’s-land of the airport grounds, giving himself the physical and mental space to calm his heightened nerves. Malik trails far behind, taking his time. No question there is a huge difference between this arrival and Jeebleh’s harrowing arrival last time, at Casillay, twenty-five kilometers to the north. He quaked to his feet then, his heart pounding with fear. Those were the days of fierce armed confrontations between the warlords StrongmanSouth and StrongmanNorth. A Green Line divided the city in unequal halves, each warlord running his half. A boy not yet in his teens had been killed before Jeebleh even left the airport, as he and his mother boarded their Nairobi-bound flight.

Jeebleh knows that the internal wrangling of the Courts has prevented them from setting up a city administration, but there is no denying the semblance of order in the shape of the white-robed men with their riding crops or bullwhips. This time, there are no shifty men to waylay one, or unruly youths to use one for target practice, taking odds on the outcome. Even if there are no uniforms or badges, there are still activities associated with authority: men stamping passports, checking papers, holding back the spectators and those welcoming passengers. They walk past the boisterous, expectant crowd, taxi drivers waiting for fares, unemployed men offering to carry their shoulder bags, beggars begging. Amazingly, no one in this rowdy lot dares to step beyond the cord meant to keep them out, over which a man in a robe stands guard with a whip. Then Jeebleh spots Dajaal, who is waving, and he relaxes. His friend is an old pro who has lived through good and bad times in this city. Jeebleh met him during his 1996 visit and knows him to be brave, reliable, meticulous, and, above all, punctual.

Jeebleh hugs Dajaal warmly, and introduces him to Malik as “the man you want on your side when the chips are down.” He introduces Malik as “my son-in-law, father to my only granddaughter.”

Dajaal has with him a gawky, toothy young man with a long neck, whom he presents as Gumaad, a journalist. Jeebleh remembers the name, and how Dajaal characterized him on the phone as a “homegrown religionist-leaning fellow.”

A crowd gathers around them, looking on curiously. In Somalia, crowds form quickly, maybe because people are hungry in many ways: hungry for news, good or bad; hungry and also hopeful that they may gain by standing close to where something is happening, to where two people are talking. But crowds change into mobs at the sound of a clarion call. Jeebleh recalls a couple of hair-raising incidents from his last visit.

As they walk toward the car, Dajaal says to Malik, “Gumaad will serve as your escort, your guide, and your researcher. God knows you will need someone with a handle on local politics, which is a minefield for a novice.”

Even if Dajaal had not said anything in advance, Gumaad’s accent would be a dead giveaway to Jeebleh. He hails from the same part of the country’s central region as do Dajaal, Bile, and StrongmanSouth, as well as the man known among the in-crowd of the Courts simply as TheSheikh, the current ideologue and firebrand of the religionists. Jeebleh has often contended that you can trace all of Somalia’s political instability over the past twenty years to this very district. Feisty and belligerent, its natives have between them contributed several of Somalia’s most obdurate warlords, deadliest head pirates, and wealthiest businessmen, each in their way sworn to making the country ungovernable.

Jeebleh takes Dajaal aside and asks, “How well do you know Gumaad?”

“How well can you know anyone these days,” Dajaal observes.

“Would you trust him? That’s my question.”

“I would string him from the rafters if he misbehaves toward you or Malik.”

Jeebleh doesn’t pursue the topic of trust, whether one can know another person in Somalia in these times. He knows that Dajaal means what he says.

Gumaad, finding himself alone with Malik, meanwhile, dispenses with formalities. “Be warned, I have strong views, and they are different from Dajaal’s.”

“I see nothing wrong with that,” Malik says easily.

They get into the sedan, Jeebleh sitting up front with Dajaal, Gumaad and Malik in the back. Dajaal starts the engine but does not move, insisting that everyone put on his seat belt. Gumaad grumbles that “belting up” is un-Islamic; accidents happen and deaths occur when Allah wills them. “When will you accept that nothing happens without His express decision?”

“In my car, we wear seat belts,” says Dajaal.

Even after he buckles up and Dajaal puts the car in motion, Gumaad doesn’t let it go. “Listen to you. ‘In my car, we wear seat belts.’ This is Bile’s car, not yours. So you can’t say ‘my car.’” A jet of his saliva strikes Malik in the face, and he wipes it away discreetly. Jeebleh, amused, shakes his head at this pointless altercation, looking from Dajaal to Gumaad. What relevance does the ownership of a vehicle have to do with wearing or not wearing seat belts? But Somalis, he knows, seldom admit to red herrings. It is typical of them to confound issues, mistake a metonym for a synecdoche. While there is always a beginning to an argument, there is never an end, never a logical conclusion to their disputation. Somalis are in a rich form when holding forth; they are in their element when they are spilling blood.

Now the car is slowing down. A man in a sarong and a T-shirt is standing in the middle of the road, holding a gun in his right hand. He flags them down.

Dajaal pulls to the side of the road and cuts the engine, as instructed. They alight, and the man gestures them to benches in the shade, an indication that they could be here for a long while. Gumaad asks, “Under whose authority?”

Dajaal gets a grip on Gumaad’s elbow and leads him toward the benches, although not without Gumaad asserting loudly that he will make a call to TheSheikh and all will be sorted out in no time. He says to the man in the sarong and the T-shirt, “We thought that checkpoints manned by armed militiamen loyal to the warlords were things of the past.”

The man pays him no attention at all.

As if to throw them further off course, another man arrives — an impressively large man, hairy of face, proud of bearing, slow of stride, with beady, penetrating, but unusually self-contained eyes. He has the longest, most unkempt beard Jeebleh has ever seen, reminiscent of a devout Sikh’s. His immaculate, all-white attire, which he wears the way a police officer might wear a uniform, consists of a tunic and pajama-like trousers, cut wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, the legs short enough to allow him to perform his ablutions without rolling them up. He carries two mobile phones, a ringing one in his right hand, a silent one in his left. Maybe there is a third mobile phone in the pocket of his tunic, which droops heavily as he strides forward. Gumaad whispers to Dajaal, “What is he doing here?”

Dajaal says, “You never know with Garweyne. But tell me, is he no longer in the computer business? I thought he was doing very well lately, considering.”

Gumaad says, “He is the rising star among those who have been inducted into the intelligence division of the military wing of the Courts.”

“I’ll be damned!” says Dajaal.

Malik overhears the conversation and thinks that, for all his size, the bearded man looks like a body builder, not an inch of flab on him.

Jeebleh is thinking about the change in the city’s attire over the past decade. In the mid-nineties, for want of trained tailors, three-quarters of the men wore sarongs. Now Mogadiscio is awash in styles imported from as far away as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He is amazed at the variety of dress, both male and female, that he has seen in just the short time he has been here.

BigBeard makes a beeline for Malik’s computer.

“Is that your computer?” the man asks Malik.

Malik stands firm, with his legs splayed and his body leaning back, as though preparing to shoulder in a resistant door.

He says to BigBeard, “I am a Somali journalist living in America and have come on a visit, inspired by the exemplary events here.”

“For whom do you write?”

“I am a freelance journalist.”

Malik recalls reading about journalists and writers visiting the Soviet Union in its day of communist glory. Those who gave cagey answers met with official reprimand and would not be issued permits. He takes the plunge. “I hope to write about the peace that has dawned in the land, thanks to the Union of Islamic Courts, which has wrested it out of the hands of the warlords and their associates.”

BigBeard speaks as though desert sand he swallowed a lifetime ago is interfering with his speech pattern, altering its rhythm, impeding its natural flow, like a drain blocked with an avalanche of sludge. He says, “Give the computer here.”

Malik’s eyes cloud with doubt as he realizes that the door he has meant to charge will not budge. But he remains silent, his expression stiffening. He furrows his forehead, more in confusion than anger, wondering why none of the others intervenes on his behalf.

“Why?” Malik asks, choking on his anger.

BigBeard has the astute look of a man who makes up his own rules as he goes along. Malik sees that there is no way he can force him to reverse the decision to dispossess him of his computer. He has met men like BigBeard before — brutes bullying journalists.

“Because I say so,” BigBeard replies. His hands are busy in his beard, twining it; his tongue is plucking at his mustache. How Malik wishes he could strike the smirk off that face. Silence reigns. What can anyone do to forestall a crisis?

Then Gumaad asks, “What if we refuse?”

BigBeard almost achieves the impossible task of working his grin into a grimace. To Gumaad he says, “We — who is we? You and who else?”

Nervous, they fidget. A subtle nod from Gumaad encourages Dajaal to say, “I’ve always believed that the difference between your lot and the warlords from whom you took control was your sense of respect. Don’t you think that our guests deserve respect?”

BigBeard is a master at taking his time. Up close, Jeebleh sees the whiskers on his cheeks twitching like those of an angry cat. He says to BigBeard, “Can we see some identification, please? That is what the young people are saying.” He speaks with the politeness of someone needing not to lose both the battle to keep the computer and the war to recover it, if it is confiscated. There is no defeat in his eyes, only mild defiance.

With the desert sand no longer audible in his voice, BigBeard says to Jeebleh, “I represent the authority of the Courts. To date, the Courts have not supplied us with identity cards. We work as volunteers. Therefore, you have to trust me on this. I advise you to cooperate for the good of all.”

Jeebleh says, “What if he refuses?”

BigBeard puts his hands in his pockets and knits his eyebrows together in the gesture of someone entertaining an unpleasant memory. At BigBeard’s command, four armed youths emerge out of a cubicle to the right of where the group is standing. The youths fan out, each in a dramatic way, as if they are mimicking a movie they have seen or some jihadi documentary they have been shown. They raise their gas-operated AK-47s and, standing with their feet apart, push the selector switches to automatic: they are ready to shoot, if provoked or ordered by BigBeard to do so. But just at this least likely moment, BigBeard volunteers his name. “I am Abu Cumar bin Cafaan,” he says, and he repeats that he is charged with ensuring that no objectionable computer software or pornographic material is imported into the country, in breach of the Islamic code of conduct.

Malik grudgingly hands over his computer.

Gumaad says to Malik, “Go in with him and type in your passwords so he can have access.”

“There is no need,” BigBeard says.

“No need?”

BigBeard says, “I should disabuse you of the view that just because we bear Muslim names from the days of the Prophet, may Allah bless him, and do not answer to Johnny, Billy, or Teddy, we’ll have difficulty accessing a computer without a password. We are not as backward as you may think.”

Dajaal says to Malik, “Give it to him and fear not what he might or might not do. We know how to deal with his kind.”

Malik sits racked with despair.

BigBeard says, “Dajaal and I — fancy bearing a satanic name and being proud of it! — have known each other for a very long time. He knows what I am capable of, this ally of the devil.”

As BigBeard walks away with the computer, leaving the four of them to exchange looks, none of them knowing what to say or do, Jeebleh remembers that, in Islamic mythology, Dajaal is the name for the Antichrist. Anyhow, he hopes that, as matters stand, the four of them will not blame one another for what has taken place. What BigBeard is doing seems to have less to do with protecting against breaches in the Islamic code of conduct than with the settling of old scores with Dajaal. Malik is already comparing this latest experience with a long chain of previous encounters with the abuse of authority, from his detention by an Afghan warlord keen on Malik’s companion, a female journalist, to the Congolese strongman who confiscated his car, cash, and an assortment of valuables.

Jeebleh calls, “Shall we wait?”

“I don’t know how long it’ll take,” replies BigBeard. “I suggest you go and take a look around the city, enjoy your lunch, have a shower.” Then, indicating Dajaal with his smug smile, he says to Jeebleh, “Send your driver and his sidekick to fetch your computer later.”

Again, no one can think of anything to say.