Crossbones

3

AS HE DRIVES AWAY, DAJAAL REMEMBERS BIGBEARD’S CHILDHOOD epithet, “the father of all lies, an uncle to deceit.” He drives fast, as though closing in on an elusive past in order to show the others what he has always seen. All he says, however, is this: “BigBeard is a man with more pseudonyms than anyone else I’ve ever known.”

Dajaal is a military man; he speaks sparingly and is not given to emotional outbursts. He is cautious, concerned that his actions do not harm either Malik or Jeebleh. He and BigBeard go back a long way. He knows BigBeard and his family members for what they are: a self-destructive lot, the less said about them, the better for all. He is relieved that Malik and Jeebleh do not press him to speak.

Jeebleh sits in back with Malik now, but Malik won’t respond to his solicitude. Jeebleh thinks how different people behave when their pride is hurt. Some sulk and withdraw into themselves, while others become jumpy, lose their cool. Where small sorrows make one incautious, Jeebleh reckons, big sorrows may render one tongue-tied. Malik is now entertaining a thoroughbred sullenness, neither looking in Jeebleh’s direction nor talking. He doesn’t even seem to be listening to Gumaad, who, emboldened by the others’ silence, blabbers away so excitedly no one can follow what he is saying. Mercifully, Malik hasn’t said anything that he may later regret.

Unable to engage Malik, Jeebleh looks out of the window, sickened by the despoliation years of civil war have wrought on the city — as would be anyone who knew the metropolis in its “pearl of the Indian Ocean” days. The square mile of downtown, where at any one of five movie houses he watched Italian films in the original and other foreign films in their subtitled or dubbed versions, is utterly disfigured, and the historical districts are demolished. He thinks, There is no hurt worse than the hurt you cannot fully describe.

Malik, meanwhile, is replaying in his head a scene from David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, which he saw recently on DVD. He is recalling in particular the harrowed look on Peter O’Toole’s face when he emerges from the interrogation room, where he has undergone such suffering at the hands of his torturers. From then on, Lawrence is a changed man. Malik reminds himself that to be effective in his profession, he must not give in to personal anger. He must concentrate on boning up on everything Somali as speedily as possible, so that he can start writing about the place knowledgeably and without prejudice.

Jammed up against the side of the car, as far away from Jeebleh as he can get in the confined space, Malik looks past Jeebleh at the ravaged streets of the metropolis. Something in the shape of anger-as-madness sticks in Malik’s gullet every time he visits a country in the throes of civil strife; but what makes this time unbearably hard to take is that this is his father’s country, a land of which his father has seldom spoken with affection.

Both his parents were children of the British Empire, an offshoot of what Lawrence of Arabia had in mind to put together. His paternal grandfather, a Somali, worked as an interpreter and an accountant with his maternal grandfather, a Malay Chinese who’d been recruited to serve in Aden. Their children were schooled together, fell in love with each other, and married. Malik is of the view that perhaps an empire of a different thrust is now at work in Somalia. The Muslim world, from what he can tell, is at a crossroads, where several competing tendencies meet. One path is a burgeoning umma, a community of the faithful as conceived in the minds of Islamists who see themselves in deadly rivalry with both moderate or secularist Muslims and people of other faiths. The way Malik sees it, Somali religionists of radical persuasion are provoking a confrontation with the Ethiopian empire in hopes of pitting the Muslim world against Christian-led Ethiopia, even though Ethiopia, being militarily stronger and an ally of the United States, is very likely to gain the upper hand in the face-off. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, India and Pakistan, two nations with nuclear potential, are locking horns. With Afghanistan turned into a theater and Chechnya haplessly caught in the fray, several countries’ political and territorial concerns converge at oblique angles. And of course there is the never-ending conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, which puts a large segment of the Muslim world in opposition to the Jewish state and the United States. Empires are no longer won by the musket, as that old imperialist Kipling argued Britain had done. An empire is won by those with the wherewithal to hold it, to subjugate it. Malik doubts very much that Shabaab can win a war, let alone, having won it, hold on to the conquered territories.

By now, Malik’s dejection has spread inside the vehicle, like a contagion for which no one has a cure. Dajaal drives on; the car moves as though on autopilot. Gumaad appears troubled as he tries to get in touch with “someone” big in the Courts hierarchy to intercede with BigBeard. Each time, the line is busy (with optimism he lets everyone know), or it rings and rings and no one picks up (which he does not bother to tell them).

Jeebleh notes the absence of youths with weapons roaming the streets, or armed clan-based militiamen high on drugs, intent on threatening the lives of those who refuse to do their bidding. Since his 1996 visit, most of the youths have grown beards and donned those white robes, save for the odd youth in military fatigues or an ill-matched uniform assembled from various post-collapse loyalties. The general collapse is still the same, though; houses with their insides caved in, with a Lego-like look to them, the floor below or the one above entirely missing.

The great tragedy about civil wars, famines, and other disasters in the world’s poor regions, he thinks, is that the rubble seldom divulges the secret sorrows it contains. The technology, the forensics to determine what is what, scientifically, is not available; the dead are rarely identified or exhumed. Often no one knows how many have perished in the mudslide or the tsunami. One never gets to hear the last words that passed their lips, or what, in the end, caused their death: a falling beam, a failing heart, a spear of bullet-shattered glass? Or sheer exhaustion with living in such horrid circumstances day in and day out?

Jeebleh cannot tell where they are in relation to the apartment, disoriented by fresh ruins from the latest confrontation between the warlords and the Courts, three months ago. One loses one’s sense of direction in a city that has suffered civil war savageries; one is, at the best of times, in want of the guidance of those who have continued to live in it. Hoping to help Malik get the hang of the city’s layout, he asks, “Where is Cambara’s current home in relation to the apartment?”

Dajaal explains, “The Green Line marking off the territory between the two warlords is gone. But more roads have fallen into disuse and worse.”

Malik says to Gumaad, “How do ordinary people with no cars move around? How is the transport here compared to other African cities?”

“I’ve never been outside Somalia.”

“How do you move about?”

“There are ten-, fifteen-seater city hoppers-on. You flag them down and jump on, and pay your fare.”

“Are they safe to take?”

“That is how I came to the airport, on a fifteen-seater minibus,” Gumaad says. “I took it from close to where I live in Yaqshid, and then I took another from Makkal-Mukarramah Road to the airport. I had to wait long for the minibus that brought me to the airport, because the driver parked at a strategic spot and waited until there were enough passengers to make it worth his while to come. On the whole, there is peace, imposed through the Courts’ goodwill. And taking the bus is safe.”

Dajaal says, “The peace imposed needs a government to make it last, a government to provide the city and its one and a half million inhabitants with social services: schools, hospitals, and so on. I doubt the Courts have the experience, the willingness, and the wherewithal to provide us with these.”

“Given time, the Courts will,” Gumaad says.

Dajaal says, “With all the infighting, the clan-based rivalry, and the corruption among top cadres, the Courts are in no position to make peace work.”

Gumaad explains how bad blood between various parties in the country has caused so many deaths and so much havoc. Dajaal and BigBeard, for example, have been enemies going back to when their families were neighbors and the two of them were young. “It’s mutual loathing born out of personal jealousies,” he maintains, then elaborates, “Dajaal here proved to be the more successful one, in every venture, while BigBeard’s efforts usually met with disaster. Dajaal did well professionally, he was a major in the army and raised a loving family and was blessed with a boy and a girl, both of whom had their own children. BigBeard has married five times, no children; and until recently, he was not doing well financially.”

“Yet he gives himself such airs,” says Jeebleh.

“A self-assured man wears no airs,” Dajaal says.

Gumaad goes on, “It is a well-known fact that BigBeard has lately targeted Bile, accusing him of living with Cambara in sin, to some an indictable offense, punishable by public stoning.”

Cambara had alluded to a religionist who was fixated on her cohabitation with Bile when she and Jeebleh spoke on the phone the previous week; but she gave no name. Now Jeebleh realizes he’s let himself be taken in by the hype about the Courts in general circulation among Somalis in the diaspora, who want to believe that the country has begun to turn a corner. It’s been his folly to invest his trust in them. He reminds himself that the dodgiest words to pass the lips of a politician are his affirmations of faith in God.

Dajaal slows down and turns left into a parking lot that Jeebleh remembers from earlier days. Dajaal and Gumaad help carry the bags up the stairs and into the flat.

There is something charming about the mess in the apartment, as if someone, with knowing chutzpah, has scattered books everywhere, making them appear to have fallen the way the petals of a geranium fall to the ground. Books — in a plethora of tongues and genres, about a miscellany of subjects — lie by the entrance into the apartment and sit orderly in the kitchen, spines showing. Books stand every which way in a metal rack; at the foot of the dining table; and in the toilet, on a low side table. Cleaned, dusted, the books are a great welcome to a professor of Italian literature and his journalist son-in-law. There is a TV set, too; from the wires showing, it looks to get cable as well.

There are flowers in vases and new curtains, and the rooms have been aired, the beds turned down — details that point to the delicate touch of a woman. In the bedrooms, there are hand towels, soaps, flyswatters, and mosquito nets, along with notes of welcome from Cambara and Bile, saying among other things, “We wish you were staying with us, and maybe you will — eventually. We’ll see.”

“Wow, so many books,” says Gumaad, who from the looks of him may never have read a book from cover to cover, and is amused at the excitement they have produced in the visitors, like children in a toy shop. He looks from Jeebleh to Malik, and then at the apartment, adding, “I’ve never known a place like this.”

Dajaal insists on pointing out where things are, like a hotel bellhop. Here is the soap; here are the towels. The security system includes a metal plate huge as a door: you lock it from the inside when you are in and use the burglar bars on the windows and the one on the door when out. Jeebleh shows them how to work these contraptions, explains which metal extension is meant for which hole. He tells them how best to engage the locks in haste, in the event of an unexpected danger. “Securing the place is very important. You must be prepared at all times. Mogadiscio is a dangerous place, but you can make it less so. Please keep that in mind.”

Lately, the apartment has been unoccupied. Bile has moved in with Cambara. Raasta, Bile’s niece — a friend to peace, who liked to say that “in a civil war, there is continuous fighting, because of grievances that are forever changing”—and simple Makka—“who smiled, crying, and cried, laughing”—are now grown and in Dublin. They are attending university and remedial school, respectively, under the eye of Bile and Jeebleh’s friend Seamus, who is spending more time in Ireland in order to be close to his bedridden mother. Jeebleh hopes to see them all there shortly, after he has helped Malik to settle in and hopefully helped to find the missing Taxliil.

Dajaal leads Malik and Jeebleh to the kitchen. He opens the fridge and points out the pantry, where the tinned foods are. Then he runs them through the mobile phones, which have local SIM cards, with prepaid airtime, as U.S. mobile phones are not compatible with those available here. He dials his number on each, to register it in electronic memory so that they may call him whenever they wish to do so. Then he makes sure that Bile’s and Cambara’s coordinates are there as well. Satisfied, he gives each of them a mobile phone, ready for use.

They all end up in a room with a sea view — it was Seamus’s for much of the time he was in the country, and later it served as Bile’s. Jeebleh offers it to Malik. Out of deference to his father-in-law, Malik declines, since Jeebleh is going to be in Mogadiscio for only a few days, but Jeebleh won’t hear of it. “I want you to have the best there is in this city, my dearest Malik,” he says, and they hug and touch cheeks.

From there, they go to Bile’s former room, which will become Jeebleh’s. Malik is looking more relaxed, realizing perhaps that he has been caught in the crosscurrents of a century-old quarrel between Dajaal’s family and BigBeard’s, and has simply stepped into a counterpunch. And since no one has said anything to cause a conflagration, there are no flames to douse. There is truth in the saying that the hearts of fools are in their mouths.

Malik wants to be alone in the room with the sea view. Jeebleh knows how keen he is on ritual. He wishes to get to know his room better in order to domesticate it, a concept that will barely make sense to a Somali pastoralist. Once, on a family trip, Malik refused to unpack his clothes until he had communed with his room’s vital force and exorcised it of its past demons. Maybe communal and personal superstitions come to the fore and dominate when one is confronted with the foreignness of a place. Jeebleh understands this as the superstition of a man thrown into the deep end of a conflict, who has to consider every aspect of his surroundings. To get the others out of the room, he offers to make tea, and they leave Malik to his rituals.

As Jeebleh makes tea, Gumaad rattles on nervously over the telephone to a friend of his, and Dajaal silently plots his next move. Jeebleh hopes that when Malik reemerges, he will be in his element. One might consider today’s incident as a rite of passage, even if Jeebleh cannot bring himself to say it. The thing is: How well does he know Malik? Does one ever have intimate knowledge of in-laws, with whom one is by nature formal?

Suddenly, Dajaal says to Gumaad, “Let’s go.”

Dajaal speaks like a man who has lit on a bright idea, on which he must act instantly. He won’t hear Jeebleh’s suggestion or Gumaad’s appeal to stay for their tea, which is almost ready.

“What’s the hurry?” Gumaad asks.

Dajaal says, “Tea later. Now we pick up the computer.”

Gumaad is insistent. “What’s the rush?”

“Have you ever heard of the proverb that asserts that where water recedes, crocodiles proliferate?” Dajaal asks.

Gumaad challenges. “What’s your point?”

But Dajaal is at the door, waiting, and then out of it as soon as Gumaad joins him.

Alone, Jeebleh drinks his tea, and thinks back to the days when the former dictator ran the country, and when censorship was at its severest; when telephone tapping was common; when one handed over his passport to the immigration officer at the airport on returning from abroad and was expected to collect it from the Ministry of the Interior a week later. There is nothing new, is there? The present situation is nothing but dictatorship by another name. He leafs through an illustrated picture book of ancient Mogadiscio, thinking that Somalis, long familiar with dictatorships of socialist vintage, are now getting accustomed to a brand of religionist authoritarianism. But the imposition of will by religious fiat is still the imposition of will.

Jeebleh also worringly remembers reading about the target assassination of several former army officers, peace activists killed at home late at night in full view of their wives and children, intellectuals eliminated, allegedly, by Shabaab operatives, who saw them as threats to their Taliban-inspired interpretation of Islam.

Dajaal telephones Jeebleh to inform him that they have picked up the computer, no problem, and they are on their way back. Jeebleh inquires whether BigBeard or one of his minions has bothered to explain what they have done to the computer, and if by any chance they deleted files or found material of a pornographic nature and removed it. Dajaal says, “He has deleted several files that were not complimentary about the Courts and the photo of a nude girl serving as a screen saver.”

It rankles Jeebleh that BigBeard has deemed the photograph of his one-year-old granddaughter, soaped and naked as she stands in a bathtub, “pornographic.” It goes to show how much energy religionists of the parochial variety squander on matters of little or no significance.

Malik joins him in the kitchen, refreshed and ready to take on the world, Jeebleh thinks. He informs Malik that Dajaal has retrieved the computer and is on his way back. When Malik asks for details, Jeebleh tells him that some of the files have been deleted, because they have been found to be uncomplimentary to the Courts.

“Is anything else deleted?” Malik wants to know.

Jeebleh tells him about the photo.

Malik says nothing. Jeebleh feels the sense of stress spreading, with Malik biting his lower lip, too angry to speak. Jeebleh thinks how stresses produce inexplicable results and he wonders how the stresses they are all under, the strain that is bound to invade them — Malik, Ahl, and himself — will affect them. What will they be like when they crack up? What will Malik be like when the nervous tension makes him go to pieces? He watches with worry as Malik steps away and stands before the mirror on the wall in the living room and takes a good look at his reflection. Jeebleh senses that even to himself Malik must look older in a matter of moments, rugged and more wrinkled, his face careworn.

Dajaal returns alone and gives the computer without further explanation to Malik. Malik handles it with care the way a mother handles a sick child who is asleep. He takes it to the table in his future workroom off the kitchen, without bothering to open it.

Jeebleh asks, “Where is Gumaad?”

“He took public transport,” Dajaal replies.

Jeebleh’s mobile phone rings. It is Cambara, saying, “Where are you all? Bile and I are waiting, and the lunch is getting cold.”

“We’re coming,” Jeebleh assures her.