Crossbones

4

AHLULKHAIR, KNOWN TO FAMILY AND CLOSE FRIENDS AS AHL, OLDER brother to Malik and the director of a Minneapolis-based center tasked with researching matters Somali, calls in sick, the first time he has done so in his long career as an educator. The truth is, the growing trend among Somali youths to join the self-declared religionist radical fringe, Shabaab, has thrown him off balance. Taxliil, his stepson, has now been gone more than six months, and is suspected to be somewhere in Somalia. In an earlier rumor, the runaway youth was seen in Kismayo, a coastal city that is in the hands of Shabaab and deemed too dangerous to visit. He was said to be training as a suicide bomber. But more recently they have heard, relayed to Ahl’s wife, Yusur, via her close friend Xalan, whose husband, Warsame, received it from a man in the Puntland Intelligence Service, that Taxliil, along with a couple of Shabaab-trained diehards, is headed for Bosaso. Warsame and Xalan live in Bosaso and have offered to host Ahl when he arrives in the region in a few days, in search of Taxliil. Nobody is sure of the whereabouts of the other twenty or so Somali-American youths who have vanished from their homes (in various parts of the United States, but principally from Minnesota), but the rumor that Taxliil has been dispatched to Puntland, hurriedly promoted to the assignment of liaising with the pirates in a bid to build a bridge between them and Shabaab, is gaining plausibility. Taxliil is said to have served twice as an interpreter to a delegation from the Courts, to help them to communicate with hostages, some of them Muslim, held by Somali pirates.

Ahl’s whole body has lately been out of kilter, so unbalanced that on occasion he has been incapable of coordinating the simplest physical demands. A month ago, he woke up just before dawn from a deep sleep, and, needing very badly to pee, sat up, ready to do just that. Only he never got to the bathroom; he wet himself, like a baby.

Malik and Jeebleh vowed to ask around about Taxliil when they reached Somalia, attempting to trace his movements in the country, but Ahl knew he must go to Puntland himself. Of course, there is no guarantee that Taxliil is in Puntland, or that any of them — Ahl, Malik, or Jeebleh — will locate him. Or that even if they do so, the young fellow will be willing to return with them to Minneapolis.

It is no easy matter preparing for a trip to Somalia these days. The country has been in the throes of unending violence for the past two decades. Moreover, Ahl and Malik, born and raised in Aden, were brought up to think of Somalia as their father’s land — and even the old man himself never knew or visited the place. Even so, he made sure his sons spoke the language from childhood. Although the country is unfamiliar, Somalia’s troubles haven’t been very far from their minds.

In preparation for his visit, Ahl has taken the required vaccinations and has begun ingesting his weekly malaria tablets. He has also been collecting as much information as he can on Puntland, poring over maps and consulting others on what to do, where to go, and whom to contact. He has been in touch with Xalan, whom his wife, Yusur has known since childhood. Ahl knows from her that Xalan’s nephew Ahmed-Rashid, her older sister Zaituun’s son, has been missing for more than a year from Columbus, Ohio, vanished during his first year at a community college there. But because Zaituun, the boy’s mother, doesn’t seem bothered about his disappearance, Xalan and Warsame and the rest of the family act as if they are not worried, either. Perhaps this has something to do with the bad blood that exists between the two sisters, Xalan and Zaituun, although they both live in Bosaso. At any rate, Yusur has assured him, it won’t affect his rapport with Xalan.

Ahl has trusted this and given the dates of his visit to Xalan in the hope that, with her husband’s help, she will set in motion security arrangements for him. He prefers putting up in a hotel to staying with her and her husband for the first couple of days, if only to get an initial take on the place and a grip on his own priorities. He has his round-trip ticket to Bosaso via Paris and Djibouti. Xalan has offered to have Warsame pick him up from the airport and has confirmed that she has booked a room for him in a hotel.

Sitting with a book about Puntland open before him, Ahl has his cell phone by his side, willing it to ring; the landline is also within his reach. He is anxious to hear from Malik, who will have just landed in Mogadiscio. He wants to know if everything has gone according to plan. The night before, with Yusur on night shift, he stayed up late watching Al Jazeera, the BBC World Service, and CNN; and supplementing the information gleaned from these sources by reading American and European newspapers online. He wants to know the latest about the impending Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.

The phone rings: Yusur asks if he has heard from Malik. When he replies that Malik hasn’t called, she lets out a whimper. Ahl reminds himself that he must remain strong for everyone’s sake. His wife has a way of pulling him down with her to a point so low that there is nothing but despair. Since her son left, she has been prone to long bouts of depression; at times, she has found it difficult to hold down her nursing job at a hospital. Of late she has been working night shifts at an old people’s home, and she seldom comes home even during the day. There is always something to do at an old people’s home, especially for a mother desperately mourning her missing son.

When Ahl arrived in the Twin Cities in the mid-1980s, there was only one other Somali in town, a delectable young woman studying art. He had been recruited from the UK, where he had taken his Ph.D. in linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, to teach in the Education Department at the University of Minnesota. He bought an apartment in downtown St. Paul large enough to host Malik two or three times a year, between assignments for the Singapore-based daily in which he published his syndicated pieces. The two brothers set themselves apart from their birth communities, hardly socializing with the Yemenis with whom they had grown up in Aden, or with the new influx of Somalis with whom they shared a loose-knit communality. Later, when Minnesota became inundated with Somalis because the then governor offered them better facilities than they could have enjoyed in San Diego, Nashville, or other places where they had initially been concentrated, the two brothers communicated in whichever language would exclude those they did not wish to understand them: Somali when among Arabs, Chinese when among Somalis, and English with each other and when they wanted to be understood.

Malik made a name for himself as a foreign correspondent. Their mother went back to Malaysia to look after her own aging parents, and their father to Somalia, his ancestral land, where, bizarrely, he melted into the rangelands of the north, tending hundreds of camels he had bought with the help of herdsmen in his employ. Their old man went totally native, as Malik liked to say, and married a woman in her late teens to produce additional offspring, in hope of making sure that his bloodline would not die out, a responsibility he no longer trusted either of his sons could fulfill.

Though neither had regular contact with either parent, the brothers went out of their way to keep each other abreast of one another’s whereabouts, troubles, endeavors, and successes. Occasionally, Malik would disappear from view for months, covering some terrible war unfolding in yet another wretched, remote country. Then he would be back, exhausted from travel and needing Ahl to listen to his adventures and to read the pieces he had written. A run of intelligent women had fallen for him, and he’d had brief affairs with many of them.

Ahl was the first to marry. He met Yusur, a Somali woman seven years his junior, at a refresher course in public health meant for Somalis newly arrived in Minneapolis. He had given a lecture on teaching Somali grammar to non-native speakers of the tongue. He and Yusur struck a heartfelt amity immediately when they talked but maintained a deferential distance for quite some time, knowing that no closeness between them was possible. She was separated from her husband and lived alone with her infant son. Her marriage was troubled — she had an unemployed husband who passed his days chewing qaat with his likewise jobless mates. To a man, they received welfare benefits and, when possible, sponged off their wives. Yusur worked and attended classes part-time and so had to hire a babysitter. Not only was this expensive, but her husband’s bad behavior reached new depths when he was arrested for sexually assaulting the babysitter.

Yusur’s in-laws were furious when she declined to pay the lawyer who had been hired in an attempt to have the charge reduced from rape to aggravated assault. And when her husband was finally released and she wouldn’t have him back, her in-laws made physical threats against her. In the end, his family, fearing he would continue to be a blight to their name, sent him off to Detroit to cool his heels and then helped him move to Toronto, where he submitted his papers as a freshly arrived Somali by virtue of a slight change to the order of his names.

Yusur and Ahl saw each other discreetly for a long time before becoming man and wife. Their wedding was private, known only to Malik and his parents. Their mother graced the occasion with her presence, but their father merely sent a terse telegram from Hargeisa: “You have my blessings.”

The boy, Taxliil, and Ahl developed a father-son rapport, and while he didn’t use the word, Taxliil behaved as though Ahl were his father.Ahl, in turn, made sure Taxliil was not lacking for anything. For most Somali children in the diaspora, he was aware, life was a chore: punishments at home; humiliation at school; mothers not assisted with the children, fathers seldom involved in raising their offspring. In many homes, relatives came and went from Somalia, bearing horror stories about what was happening in their country. The phones would ring at two, three, or four in the morning, the caller needing money to pay the burial expenses of a clansman killed in an intermilitia skirmish back home. With all the turmoil and the constant noise of the television, youngsters often lacked the will, the peace of mind, and the time to do their schoolwork.

But this was not the case in the home where Taxliil grew up, thanks to Ahl. The three of them lived as a nuclear family: a man, a woman, and a child, with Uncle Malik occasionally visiting, an ideal model, one would have thought, for a boy growing up. There was order and abundant love in the household. Ahl made time to supervise Taxliil’s homework. Twice a week, Taxliil went to the neighborhood mosque to receive religious instruction from a Somali teacher with rudimentary Arabic, and often Ahl would subtly set Taxliil right without pointing out the teacher’s failings.

On his first day of secondary school, Taxliil met a green-eyed Kurdish boy, Samir. The two became inseparable. They played sports and computer games together; swapped clothes; swam and took long walks on weekends. They spurred each other to achieve their ambitions. Neither admitted to knowing what the word impossible meant. Doing well wasn’t good enough; they did better than anyone else.

One summer vacation, Samir flew out to Baghdad with his father to visit Iraq for the first time since the American takeover. He was sitting in the back of the car with his grandparents, his father in the front next to the driver, Samir’s uncle, when an American Marine flagged them down at a checkpoint. Samir alighted speedily and waited by the roadside, away from the vehicle, as instructed. His father helped Grandma in regaining possession of her walker and held his hand out to her as she shakily stepped out of the vehicle. Meanwhile, his uncle bent down to assist Grandpa, who was still in the car, in retrieving his cane, and he took a long time, half his body hidden from view. Panicking that one of the two men would shoot him, the young Marine opened fire, killing everyone except Samir.

Back in the Twin Cities, Samir became morose. The two friends still spent time together, but their life lacked the fun and ambition they had previously shared. Then Samir began to speak of attending to his “religious responsibilities,” and shortly thereafter he vanished from sight. A month or so later, his photo appeared in the Star Tribune, the caption reading: “Local boy turns Baghdad suicide bomber.”

The FBI came early the next morning and descended with unnecessary force on Taxliil, Ahl, and Yusur, as if they had detonated the bomb that caused the death of the soldiers. They were taken in separate vehicles and fingerprinted, their histories together and separately gone over again and again. Taxliil was made to endure longer hours of interrogation, with repeated threats. The FBI showed keen interest in Ahl as well, because of his birthplace and because he, Yusur, and Taxliil now lived in a house close to potential escape routes along the Mississippi. An FBI officer accused him of being a talent spotter for radical groups in the Muslim world.

The officers cast Yusur in the role of witness. They handled her with kindness, in light of her history. In their narrative, she had gone from a rapist to a man with a history of subversive tendencies, the older brother of a journalist able to tap into jihadi resources because of his connections. The officer asked Yusur if Ahl was likely to recruit Taxliil as a suicide bomber. They suggested she get it off her chest; they were her friends, and they meant her well. Who were his friends? Whom did he contact, and how did he do it?

Eventually, all three were released by the FBI. Even so, they were told to inform the agency of any suspicious activities. If they failed to do so, they would be reclassified.

Ahl sits with his mobile phone close by, yet it does not ring. He thinks that misfortune has followed the Somalis who fled their warring homeland; braved the seas; and put up with rape, daily harassment, corruption, and abuse. Just when they were on safe ground, they turned on themselves, with their young setting up armed gangs, as if they were out to prove that they could be better at cruelty than their elders. Somali-on-Somali violence in the Twin Cities rivaled Somali-on-Somali violence in their civil war — torn homeland.

The next time misfortune called, Taxliil was ready to follow. It took him back to Somalia, his route an enigma, the source of the funds that paid for his air ticket a mystery, his handlers a puzzle, the talent spotters who recruited him a riddle. When Ahl decided that he would go to Somalia, Yusur asked him why he would risk his own life in pursuit of the hopeless case of a young boy who had disappeared to God knows where. Ahl replied that he wished to reduce the number of unknown factors. He added, “I do not want to regret later that I did not go in search of our son. Taking the risk is the least I can do.”

News arriving from Somalia is often no more than hearsay bolstered by scuttlebutt, fueled by rumor. Essentially this is what Ahl and Yusur have come to learn: Taxliil has joined the volunteer Somali youth brigade, recruited from within Somali communities in the diaspora and earmarked to train as jihadis. Ahl shakes at the thought that an innocent Taxliil, misled by an imam on whom he modeled his life, might come to harm. He doesn’t know what would become of him and Yusur if something terrible were to happen to Taxliil.

When he has waited long enough and Malik has still not rung, he heads toward the Baraka Mall, to get additional phone numbers in Bosaso from a relative of Yusur’s who owns a stall there. As soon as he gets out of his car, his gaze meets the stare of one of Taxliil’s uncles, who rudely turns his back on him without so much as a smile or greeting. That the man does not bother to ask if there is news of his nephew disturbs Ahl. He probably wouldn’t tell the man much; certainly not that he is off to Somalia in search of the runaway boy. Ahl is aware that Yusur’s former in-laws blame them for what has happened, given that he and Yusur have had custody of Taxliil. He walks away downcast, then looks up at the sign that reads, Welcome to Baraka Mall. He reads it softly in English, and then loudly in Somali.

The Somali mall in the Twin Cities has been open for a number of years. It was the idea of a Pakistani émigré who bought it dirt cheap when it was an abandoned auto repair shop, and subdivided it into ten-by-ten-meter shops and six-by-eight kiosks. He rented these out to Somalis who needed to establish businesses to supplement their families’ meager incomes from the welfare department. The scheme worked to the Bangladeshi’s advantage and he was able to recoup his investment. Ahl can’t tell if the contention that he levies rents higher than market rate is true or just loose-lipped Somali talk, but clearly the venture has been successful.

In the warren of narrow passageways, Somali merchants sell clothes and memorabilia from Somalia, and goods imported mainly but not exclusively from the Arabian Gulf and the Indian subcontinent. Somalis, with no English or qualification in any profession, and no possibility of finding other work, have set up these stalls and opened restaurants, barbershops, music shops, and outlets for DVDs in Somali. This all-Somali mall has created a symbiosis, with many Somalis coming to exchange news about their country. The Somalis in charge of running the mall have agreed not to show TV news such as CNN or BBC, fearing this might cause flare-ups; they play only sports channels.

Ahl walks through the narrow hallway, bright with fluorescent lights. He passes a travel agency, a fabric store, and stalls specializing in jewelry imported from the Gulf. A large shop with metal bars in front of it promises to transfer your money into the recipient’s hands anywhere in Somalia in less than twenty-four hours.

Up the steps to the first floor, two more shops down a shorter corridor, and Ahl enters a shop. The owner is on the phone, talking loudly — Somalis have the habit of speaking at deafening levels when they are making long-distance phone calls, as if the greater the distance their voices have to travel, the higher the volume must be. Every passerby stops and stares and then continues walking, many shaking their heads, even though they, too, shout just as animatedly as this man when they make long-distance calls.

As Ahl waits, the man’s voice grows louder by the second, then suddenly he disconnects, and is quiet. He turns to Ahl, greets him warmly, and then opens a drawer and brings out a piece of paper with phone numbers written on it. The man’s lips move, like a child practicing the spelling of a new word, and then he says, employing his normal voice, “Here they are, the numbers you wanted.”

Ahl nods. “Thanks.”

“I’ve just spoken to Warsame,” says Ninety-Decibels. “All is well, as promised.”

Ahl is relieved that Ninety-Decibels does not confuse him by naming the names of Yusur’s relatives, whom he is expected to know but doesn’t; he has no desire to get mixed up with the local politics, if he can help it, and he won’t do so, unless the situation demands it. Staring at the names on the piece of paper torn from a child’s exercise book, Ahl is aware that he is encountering a catalog of relationships entangled through blood, marriage, or both. This is where his upbringing in an insulated nuclear family fails him. To operate well in Somalia, one memorizes and makes active use, on a daily basis, of a multitude of details having to do with who is who in relation to whom. Most Somali speakers can’t help but mention the clan names of everyone they talk about, and so he is often left utterly confused.

Ninety-Decibels continues, “Xalan and Warsame have been informed about your arrival, and one or both of them will meet your flight in Bosaso. They will take you to your hotel.”

Ninety-Decibels’s phone rings, and he answers it. To Ahl’s surprise, though, Ninety-Decibels lowers the timbre of his voice to forty decibels. Ahl assumes the man must be speaking to someone local, maybe next door. When he hangs up, Ninety-Decibels asks, “Will you be looking for Taxliil?”

Ahl hesitates visibly, but says with a straight face, “We have no idea where he is.”

“You say no news yet from your son?”

“We wait and hope,” Ahl says.

When the phone rings and Ninety-Decibels’s timbre escalates to 150 decibels, Ahl decides it is time to leave. As he departs, he mouths, “Thank you.”