Hiding in Plain Sight

2

With the aircraft doors closed and the plane ready to depart, Bella half listens to the flight attendant giving instructions she must have heard a million times over the years as she crossed oceans, changed continents, exchanged one time zone for another. It starts to dawn on her now that her body time is nowhere near the one her wristwatch is telling her, nor will it match the time it will be when the plane lands in Nairobi tomorrow. She is in her own time zone, much more jet-lagged than she has ever been, her brain little better equipped for thinking than a cabbage in the process of becoming sauerkraut.

Of course, Aar’s death has been traumatizing, but it also comes on top of months of nearly nonstop travel. She has been putting together a book meant to document the outward migration of Somalis in pictures and words — nearly three million people in the space of a decade making a move from one of the least developed countries in the world to some of the most advanced. To that end, she has been traveling from Rome to several European countries where Somali refugee populations abound, and then to North America, including the cities of Toronto, Ottawa, Minneapolis, Columbus, and San Diego. From there, she was off to Australia and New Zealand, after which she took the Brazil trip for work and to visit with her lover there.

A life of quality merde mixed with quite a bit of weltschmerz.

Although she and Aar were not refugees, they were among the penultimate wave to leave Somalia, the last before the hemorrhage of a million and a half persons of all ages, classes, and educational backgrounds who quit the country and then the continent, and ended up anywhere that would take them. Two decades after the start of this stampede, some clarity is emerging as to which of these expatriate communities is thriving and which have stayed at the lowest rung of development. It has been Bella’s intention to document the successes and the failures alike. Initially, she wanted to go to Somalia, maybe even visit Aar in Mogadiscio. But now Bella thinks she may shelve the entire project or at least postpone it until Dahaba and Salif are both out of school, their lives settled and their futures on an even keel. A pity, because Bella had been funding the project herself from her meager earnings, against the advice of several friends, who suggested that she seek funding from one of the European foundations or even from the UN’s International Labour Organization.

As the plane levels at thirty thousand feet and the flight attendants come around to offer drinks and snacks, Bella reminds herself that Marcella forgot to give back her credit card. She discovered this while waiting in the passenger lounge at the airport, but she realized it was too late to do anything about it. Lucky she has plenty of cash from the unused pile she returned with from Brazil and a couple of other credit cards she always carries with her when she travels, in the event of an emergency.

Instead of worrying needlessly about her credit card, Bella used her time in the lounge to check her messages. Which is how she discovered a strange text informing her that Valerie and Padmini, her Asian-British partner, have spent a night in a lockup in Kampala, Uganda, having been accused of engaging in illicit sex. The sender signed off only as “G,” which Bella suspected stood for Gunilla Johansson, the colleague of her brother’s in Nairobi who left her the message telling her of his death.

Following her hunch, she tried Gunilla’s number and reached her. At the sound of her voice and the mention of Aar’s name, the tears were back, this time with Gunilla’s accompaniment. The two of them were so hopelessly emotional that Bella forgot to ask about Valerie and the mysterious text, and Gunilla did not manage to give her any information worth remembering. Then just before she boarded the flight, Bella telephoned Mahdi and Fatima, who were among Aar’s closest friends in Nairobi and whose children were Dahaba and Salif’s schoolmates. When Mahdi offers to meet her flight, Bella thanks him but declines, worried that she may be in an even worse state when she lands.

The business-class flight attendant gives Bella an elaborate menu printed in several languages; Bella takes it with both hands but doesn’t bother to open or look at it. The idea of ordering food so soon after Aar’s death appalls her. She declines the offer of the meal and closes her eyes, out of a combination of fatigue and the effort to fight the primal urge building up within her to take revenge against those who murdered her brother. When she opens her eyes, she says to the stewardess, her voice faltering, “Actually, I wouldn’t mind having a coffee with some Baileys.” The stewardess hesitates, looking embarrassed, as if deciding whether or not to tell Bella to wait until after the meals have been served. Then she disappears into the galley and returns with the creamy Irish stuff, as if she were serving at a Dublin wake.

Meanwhile, Bella engages her neighbor, a young Alemannic-speaking woman sporting an ostentatious coiffure, which must have cost her quite a bit, dyed in the colors of exotic birds and arranged in terraces. Her dress, by contrast, is scanty, her tank top bursting at the seams under the pressure of a well-developed chest. The shirt bears a slogan across the front promoting love in all forms, in German and English. Bella hopes that the woman is not on her way to Somalia or any other Muslim land, where she would surely be stoned on sight.

“Where are you headed?” Bella asks the woman.

“Nairobi,” the woman replies.

“As a tourist?”

“I am going to marry my lover, who lives there.”

Bella is tempted to know the gender of the young woman’s betrothed — she can’t help thinking of Valerie evidently languishing in Uganda — but then Kenya, next door, is the capital of gay culture in East Africa, an altogether different proposition. At any rate, she knows this is not her business and so choreographs the conversation in another direction.

“And this,” Bella ventures, indicating the elaborate coiffure, “this is for the occasion?” She thinks of all the sacred texts — of Islam, of Judaism, of Sikhism — in which the growing or covering of hair plays an important part, welcoming this distraction from thinking about Aar’s death.

“More or less.”

“And where are you getting married?”

“In a church in the center of Nairobi.”

She will go this far and no further. But when the plane hits a pocket of turbulence and the young woman, looking frightened, opens and closes her mouth without issuing a word, Bella leans forward and says, “It is all right. I am here, we are here.” And then, surprising herself, she takes the woman’s hand in hers, and they settle effortlessly into a place of mutual comfort, each deriving solace from the contact. Bella drops into a well of exhaustion, thinking ahead to her reunion with Dahaba and Salif, and imagining the hard times ahead for which she must prepare. But by the time the flight attendant comes to collect her cup, she is dead to the world, still holding the hand of the scantily dressed, heavy-chested woman with the fantastic hair with the tenderness of a lover. It isn’t until her seatmate reclaims her hand, with the aim of going to the bathroom, that Bella wakes with a start. For a sleepy moment, she doesn’t remember where she is and what on earth she is doing, and then she stays awake for the next few hours, wary and worried.

As much as she dislikes Valerie, Bella can’t help wondering about the circumstances of her alleged arrest. You can’t be cautious enough in a country that legally forbids same-sex lovemaking; you are bound to lay yourself open to blackmail and arrest if you engage in “inappropriate behavior,” which has recently become synonymous with illegal behavior in a growing roster of places. In Dubai, a British heterosexual couple smooching in the lobby of their five-star hotel had been jailed for a year, for example.

In Bella’s mind, freedoms are a package, so the freedoms denied daily to millions of citizens in Africa or the Middle East are bound up with the lack of democracy in these parts of the world. The choices individuals make in their private lives are just as important as the choices they make at the ballot box. Public displays of affection, whether between a man and a woman or two men or two women, are but expressions of democratic behavior. No one, not even the president of a country, should have the power and the authority to define love — including whom to love. So while Bella hasn’t a kind word to say about Valerie, she is nonetheless sad to learn that she has been a victim of such repression. True, she and Padmini — particularly Padmini, being Uganda-born — should have known better than to visit a country where they might easily fall afoul of the law. The cynic in Bella wonders if unconsciously Valerie was trying to steal Aar’s thunder by any means possible. He has been dead less than a week, after all.

And then she thinks, enough of Valerie, at least until she learns more about her situation from Gunilla. It is time she thought about other topics of greater personal relevance. Her niece and nephew are far more important than a foolish woman who gets herself locked up in a Ugandan jail.

At last she lowers her seat into a narrow bed and, turning and tossing in the confined space, wills herself to sleep.

—

She wakes when the service trolley rolls over the blanket that has been half covering her feet. She opens her eyes and stares at the flight attendant, waiting for the woman to apologize.

But the stewardess only says, “Breakfast?”

“How much more time until we land?” asks Bella.

“Two hours and a bit.”

Bella orders water, juice, and coffee. When she gets back from the bathroom, she notices that the woman across the aisle is filling in the form for immigration into Kenya. She presses the call button above her seat and asks for a form for herself.

Bella has always found Kenya’s entry form to be ill designed and clumsy. It never gives the traveler the needed space to write the answers. In addition, Kenya has lately been a problem country for Somalis, who are harassed from the moment they present their papers to the immigration officials and are asked relentlessly embarrassing questions. She fills in the form with trepidation, holding her pencil in midair as she frets over the best answers to give for “reason for visit” and “length of stay.” She can’t afford to be in a nervous state when she presents her documents and is questioned about them. She hopes that her Italian passport, which boasts multiple entries into and exits out of numerous countries, will help allay anyone’s worries that she may overstay her welcome in Kenya. Even so, her best option is to state that she is a photographer in the country as a tourist. Then the officer is bound to say, “Welcome, madam,” and stamp her in.

The pilot announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have begun our descent,” and all of a sudden the sky, which has been clear, turns leaden and gray, and clouds envelop the plane like curtains being drawn. It begins to rain heavily, each drop, which are as big as one of Bella’s tears, splattering against the windows. What feels like a tropical storm is raging around them, as though the very heavens were angry. Outside the windows, lightning flashes as the plane careens down through the storm. The darkness becomes more intense and there is a loud banging, as if the wings were coming off the plane, and Bella can see nothing except the occasional flash of lightning and the endless gray clouds until suddenly the plane veers left, as if avoiding an oncoming object, then descends again with a lurch, and suddenly the clouds part and the ground is visible below them, very close.

The pilot lands safely despite the weather and taxis to a stop far from the terminal. He counsels calm, urging the passengers to remain seated, but he allows them to use their mobile phones as they wait for assistance.

—

There is nothing like sharing a near-death experience to bring people closer, even briefly. And later, when they’ve all gone their separate ways, they’ll tell the same stories about it — the story of how the woman with the varicolored hair went berserk, or how another passenger threw off her seatbelt and bounced up and down like a dervish, madly reciting all the while what Bella took to be a Hindu prayer, or how a third was scared so witless that his eyes grew to the size of golf balls, the pupils dilated, and his Adam’s apple went up and down as if he might be choking on his tongue. Amid the adrenalized frenzy, Bella kept calm, even managing to lend a hand to her fellow passengers. Somehow she was certain that this time death would spare her so that she could go care for her nephew and niece.

Now that they are safely on the ground, a general feeling of euphoria sets in, and soon the air is abuzz with the chatter of mobile-phone conversations. Bella can hear some of the passengers repeating the more vivid details of what occurred, and a couple of them are already embellishing the account in preparation for the moment when they will appear on the news.

After a very long wait, airport emergency services show up, and the cabin doors are finally opened. There is terrific chaos when the doors open and the passengers who are closest to the exit collide with the men and women who have been sent to deliver assistance to those in need. With several people shouting for attention at the same time, the mayhem seems likely to sabotage every good effort to provide help until the pilot enters the fray, once more advising restraint. He requests that all passengers not injured in the bumpy descent please sit and remain seated until those who need help receive it. A passenger in business class, accustomed to what he refers to as “the priority for which I paid,” insists that he be the first to exit. It takes the shaming of several fellow passengers and the venomous reprimand of one of the male flight attendants to get him to settle down, but once he does, the mood of the other passengers takes a positive turn. With calmness prevailing, they collaborate in filing out of the aircraft and into the waiting buses in an orderly manner.

Bella, waiting her turn to disembark, negotiates her shoulder bag, heavy with her computer, with a big hard camera case made of shiny metal in her right hand, and a smaller matching case in her left. She is remembering previous, more pleasant visits to these parts, visits that she always looked forward to. Aar used to take her and his children to out-of-town restaurants such as the one in Naivasha, her favorite, which boasted gorgeous vistas, the blueness of the lake complementing a clear sky that extended in every direction. This visit, weighed down by death, will be very different.

Just as she is about to clamber on board the bus to the terminal, hauling her cases, a man approaches her too close for comfort. A tall, thin European, with chiseled features and a tan, is eyeing her as if debating whether to speak to her or not. His brazen stare puts her off and she doesn’t bother to answer him when he says, “Will you have a drink with me if I were to ask you out? I’ll show you a fabulous time, the best you’ve ever had in the company of a man.”

For the first time, Bella wishes that she had allowed her sorrow to express itself, which might have discouraged such advances. Now she tries to cut him down with a look of bitter distaste that makes it obvious she wants nothing to do with him. She gets on the bus, retreating into the rear, where she stands next to the woman with the many-hued hair. The man gets on board as well, but he keeps his distance, contenting himself with glancing in her direction every now and then.

Immigration is a breeze. In fact, she has never seen a friendlier group of immigration officers. Chatty and apologetic for the difficult landing, they are quick to say “Welcome!” to every passenger who approaches. Nor does anyone bother to ask for the supposedly mandatory yellow fever certificate — this in an airport known for holding travelers for hours and extorting bribes from them.

And even though it takes a much longer time than usual for the luggage to be delivered to the cranky carousel, nobody complains. When Bella finally collects her other cases, she realizes that there is no need for her to rush; no one is meeting her. And so she heads toward the exit, dreading only mildly that the man who approached her earlier might make a further nuisance of himself, in which case she has decided to deal with him firmly and, if need be, crudely.

Bella pushes the loaded baggage trolley forward, feeling hot inside her black cotton shift. She walks slowly, her gait unsteady, her cheeks now wet with tears again, her sight blurred. She finds a bench to rest her exhausted bones on, sitting until the waves of nausea start to abate. She feels uncomfortable being so infirm in so public a place, but the familiarity of her surroundings relaxes her a little, even if there is no Aar to meet her or no taxi driver holding up a placard with her name. She lets herself sit and weep, not bothering to wipe away the tears. She asks herself why death, and why now? And why did death deprive her of her adored brother? Why has misfortune chosen to descend on her and her nephew and niece at a time when they are so ill prepared for loss?

A tall man standing nearby, a Masai from the looks of him, approaches. “Madam!” he says repeatedly, until she looks up. Once he has her full attention, he says, “Taxi,” as if this were her name. Gradually other men join them, and one of them takes her by the arm, another grabs hold of her bags, a third insists that she ride in his taxi because he will give her a bargain price. She looks from one to the other, clearly miffed. She focuses her hard stare on the man who is trying to dispossess her of her computer bag and who already has in the grip of his right hand one of the camera cases. She restrains herself from speaking, but her expression and body language indicate clearly that she wants him to give back her bags.

Then the man who approached first, the Masai — she takes in his torn ears and his sharpened teeth — tries to put the others to shame, accusing them of being a disgrace to their profession and their nation. Bella gives her face a quick wipe, as if the word “disgrace” is equally addressed to her. The mood changes, and nearly all of the taxi drivers step back, some of them moving on immediately and others mumbling their dissent and straggling away slowly, unhappy at being shut out. Bella beckons the Masai.

“Hotel 680, please.”

“Yes, madam. Please follow me!”

He pushes the unwieldy trolley with her pile of heavy cases in the direction of the exit, and Bella hurries to keep pace with him to the open-air parking lot. When he opens the back door of the taxi, she indicates that she wants to sit in the front.

Nairobi traffic is atrocious, disorderly, and murderously slow. It’s as if this city has a violent strain running in its veins. It’s an in-between place, with many different tendencies pulling its residents in diverse directions, and it seems fitting to Bella that it started as a railway depot at the turn of the last century. In slapdash fashion, it has grown into a “self-help city,” as an urban anthropologist has put it, in which the Africans must make do while European tourists are drawn by the promise of adventure and safari.

The taxi is Japanese-made and rickety, as if it could easily be pulled apart. It’s hot too, but Bella dares not roll down the window, even a little, on account of the black fumes and white smoke emitted by the malfunctioning trucks ahead of them, which pollute the air as well with venomous bellowing. Bella sits with her computer bag between her knees, pondering the world outside. She is not sure of the name of the poet, but there is a line that she has always appreciated for its balance and alliteration: “It is beautiful, it is mournful, it is monotonous.” To this she adds another line of her own composition: “There is glory in grief.”

With the traffic at a standstill, the driver starts a conversation. “Madam, to what name do you answer? My own name is David.”

Uncomfortable at giving the name by which she is known, Bella says, “Some of my friends call me Barni.”

“What does Barni mean in your language?” he says.

“Something to do with a baby born with a birthmark.”

“You were born bearing a birthmark?”

She improvises. “I was named after an ancestor.”

“What is your country of origin?”

Bella doesn’t fancy giving her life history to this stranger either, so she turns on the radio, which jabbers away in a language she does not comprehend.

David asks, “Do you understand this language?”

Several young men circulate among the cars with things to sell: fruit, combs, cell phone chargers, and shoelaces. People buy from them as they sit in traffic. Bella rolls down the window and prices several items just to engage these young men and women in conversation and avoid a further exchange with David.

“Barni, eh? That is a beautiful name,” David says.

In truth, she is rich in names. Her mother called her Isabella, but only when she was upset with her, lengthening the vowels and rolling her tongue over its syllables. Bella is the name by which she is known outside her immediate circle. Barni is her middle name, which affords those who are most intimate with her the chance to address her as BB.

The question is not what is in a name, but rather how many of them she can answer to. She thinks it is a useful thing to have an array of names, each presenting her with different possibilities. Well aware that people she encounters rarely forget meeting her, even if they did so fleetingly. Yet she sometimes delights in denying having met someone and, if challenged, asks if they remember her name — whereupon she insists that she is called by a different name. Outside the Horn of Africa, she prefers the use of her Somali name; inside the Somali-speaking region, she is Bella.

A blind man with a boy for a guide pushes his way toward the car. He is as determined to get her attention as the street hawkers, it seems. He recites a Muslim prayer, wishing her safe passage, and touches her elbow when she isn’t looking. She shrinks from the physical contact and rolls the window up again. Just then the traffic moves.

Presently, she spots a web in the corner of the floorboards, close to where her foot is resting, a web woven and then forsaken, and then she sees another, this one active, in which a bigger spider has recently trapped a tiny insect, which is now trying to wiggle its way out alive. Bella bends down and frees the insect, which shakes its whole body and then tenses, like a gymnast readying to somersault and hit the ground with his feet wide, balanced and firm. The spider goes in determined pursuit, and both vanish through a gaping hole in the floor of the car.

With nothing better to do, Bella returns her attention to the driver. She volunteers that she has missed Africa, missed the smell of night fires, the mellifluously tonal languages, and the calls of neighbors across a village courtyard after a day’s hard work has left them too exhausted to bother with the formality of coming out of their homes.

The driver asks, “So you were born in Africa?”

“Born and brought up a Somali,” she says.

“Both your parents are Somali, are they?”

Again Bella seizes up, and as the traffic moves a little faster, she revisits the most salient fact about her life, which is that for most of her early years she believed Digaaleh, nicknamed “Arab” on account of his very light skin, to be her biological father and Aar her full brother. She was seven when she first made the acquaintance of Giorgio Fiori in 1988. Fiori was then on a return visit to Mogadiscio in the capacity of leader of an Italian government delegation charged with determining if Italy should continue funding university education in Somalia and for how long.

Bella, as it happened, would meet her father again less than a year and a half later, when she and her mother and Aar fled the anarchy surrounding the collapse of Somalia to the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya, where they were declared stateless and were made to stay in a refugee camp. Fiori came in person to take them out of the refugee camp and fly them to Nairobi, where he presented them with Italian visas so they could go with him to Rome. It was a couple of months later that Digaaleh, who had remained behind in Mogadiscio, had surgery on his prostate. Half a year later, he would be dead.

Bella remained in Rome with Fiori, who supplied her with the obligatory papers allowing her to remain in Italy and pursue her studies. When she was older, she moved into an adjacent one-bedroom apartment that he paid for so they could be in constant touch, sharing evening meals often and spending a great deal of time together. Still, she led her private life discreetly, never speaking of her Neapolitan lover, a cameraman working in the studios of Cinecittà, the film studios established by Benito Mussolini on the outskirts of Rome in 1937. No one could be more aware of the importance of Cinecittà than Bella, as she had been brought up on Italian cinema, popular during her days in Mogadiscio. Her Neapolitan lover showed her the precise location where Ben-Hur was shot, and they gave her a private tour of Teatro 5, where Federico Fellini made his most famous films.

Aar and Hurdo eventually relocated to Toronto, where they were first granted refugee status and later Canadian citizenship. Within a couple of years, Hurdo learned she had ovarian cancer. Aar cared for her even as he pursued his graduate studies in human migration. After Hurdo died, Aar joined the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental organization headquartered in Geneva.

It takes the taxi a little more than three hours to get to Bella’s hotel. By the time she arrives, she is too exhausted to evaluate just how terribly the place has aged since her last stay, but she can see that the walls need more than a lick of paint and the chairs are sunken with use. She asks for the room she occupied a decade ago when she was on assignment here and met her Kenyan lover, HandsomeBoy Ngulu, who is no longer in the modeling business and now works for an NGO specializing in the eradication of illiteracy in Africa. But she still remembers him as an exemplary subject, patient, willing to do as many takes as she wanted, always smiling, forever prepared to make her happy.

What a disaster it was, their first lovemaking! But things began to improve with each night they spent together, and Bella still thinks of him as her bell’uomo. Now that Bella is in Nairobi, however, she thinks that she must seek out HandsomeBoy Ngulu to apprise him of her new situation and suggest that they cease being lovers; life now is just too complicated.