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1

“GUNS LACK THE BODY OF HUMAN TRUTHS!”

Barely had his feet touched the ground in Mogadiscio, soon after landing at a sandy airstrip to the north of the city in a twin-engine plane from Nairobi, when Jeebleh heard a man make this curious statement. He felt rather flatfooted in the way he moved away from the man, who followed him. Jeebleh watched the passengers pushing one another to retrieve their baggage lined up on the dusty floor under the wings of the aircraft. Such was the chaos that fierce arguments erupted between passengers and several of the men offering their services as porters, men whom Jeebleh would not trust. Who were these loiterers? He knew that Somalis were of the habit of throwing despedida parties to bid their departing dear ones farewell, and of joyously and noisily welcoming them in droves at airports and bus depots when they returned from a trip. However, the loiterers gathered here looked as though they were unemployed, and were out to get what they could, through fair or foul means. He wouldn’t put it past those who were armed to stage a stickup, or to shoot in order to get what they were after. He was in great discomfort that the Antonov had landed not at the city’s main airport — retaken by a warlord after the hasty departure of the U.S. Marines — but at a desolate airstrip, recently reclaimed from the surrounding no-man’s-land between the sand dunes and low desert shrubs, and the sea.

Jeebleh observed that after retrieving their baggage, the passengers congregated around the entrance to a lean-to shed, pushing, shoving, and engaged in acrimonious dispute. A minute later, he worked out that the shack was “Immigration,” when he saw some of the passengers handing over their passports, and the men inside receiving the documents and disappearing. If the lean-to was the place to have his passport stamped, who, then, were the men inside, since they had no uniforms? What authority did they represent, given that Somalia had had no central government for several years now, after the collapse of the military regime that had run the country to total ruin?

Turning — because the man spoke again, repeating his remark about guns — Jeebleh saw the stranger’s late-afternoon shadow, and decided that he and the man had never met before. If they had, he would have remembered, because this man boasted a mouth that wasn’t much of a mouth, with a pair of lips that appeared tucked away, virtually invisible. He was very tall and unnaturally thin. Jeebleh couldn’t help wondering to himself whether the man hadn’t been looking after himself in the style to which he had once been accustomed, or whether he had always been thin. But seeing his dignified posture and the way he carried himself, Jeebleh couldn’t imagine how anyone could survive and prosper in the conditions of Mogadiscio, described to Jeebleh by Somalis in the know as cloak-and-dagger, man-eat-man politics. The man was probably educated, and perhaps had held a high position during the former brutal dictatorial regime, whose popular overthrow had led to the ongoing strife. Or he may have been a well-regarded academic at the National University, now to all intents and purposes defunct.

“What do guns lack?”

The man repeated, “They lack the body of human truths!”

Jeebleh thought: There you are! For it was no accident that the first sentence spoken to him by a stranger began with the word “guns.” This was emblematic of the civil war vocabulary, and times being what they were, he was sure he would have many opportunities to listen to everyone’s take on guns and related terms.

He looked away, and his gaze fell on two youths with missing limbs, asking passengers and onlookers alike to take them to an outlying shack where they might make telephone calls, or escort them to a depot not far away where they could get transport to the city. He quickly averted his eyes, turning his full attention back to the man. Jeebleh felt weak, and sensed vaguely that something wasn’t right.

“Everyone calls me Af-Laawe,” the man said.

Jeebleh was embarrassed for his lack of manners in not shaking the man’s extended hand, and for his own failure to reciprocate and introduce himself.

Af-Laawe continued, “You need not bother yourself, because your reputation precedes you. So let me welcome you home, Jeebleh!”

The sun moved in a dazzle. And as though in a daze, Jeebleh looked about, certain that at a conscious level he was not sufficiently prepared for the shocks in store for him during this visit, his first to Mogadiscio in more than two decades. He would have to adapt to the new situation. He reminded himself that he had felt a strange impulse to come, after an alarming brush with death. He had nearly been run over by a Somali, new to New York and driving a taxi illegally. He hoped that by coming to Mogadiscio, the city of death, he might disorient death. Meanwhile, he had looked forward to linking up with Bile and, he hoped, meeting his very dear friend’s niece Raasta, who had lately been abducted.

“How do you know who I am?”

“I’m a friend of Bile’s,” the man responded.

“How is Bile doing?”

“It depends on who you talk to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bile has many detractors, people who associate his name with terrible deeds!”

“Are you one of his detractors?”

The question seemed to throw Af-Laawe off balance, and he fell silent. In the meantime, Jeebleh made sure he had his carry-on and his shoulder bag, in which he kept his documents, firmly between his feet. Distrustful of the thin man’s motives, he tried a different tack to come to grips with his discomfort about everything since his arrival. “Did Bile know I was on this flight?” he asked.

“Maybe Nairobi rang to alert me.”

“You speak as though ‘Nairobi’ were someone’s name,” he said, and waited for Af-Laawe, who was proving hard to pin down.

Af-Laawe was clearly happy to steer the conversation away from Bile. “Some of us think of the cities we know very well and where we’ve lived as intimate friends.”

Jeebleh knew what he meant, knew that in moments of great anxiety, one may mistake the self for the world. But he explicitly checked his precautionary measures, pulling his shoulder bag and carry-on onto his body. He had his few clothes in his shoulder bag. On advice from friends in Kenya, where he had spent a couple of days, he had left a bigger suitcase in Nairobi, depositing it at the left luggage of his hotel. He had brought more books than clothes with him to Mogadiscio, assuming that reading material would be more difficult to come by in a city ruled to ruin by gunrunners.

Now he massaged his right shoulder, which was giving him cause for worry, because one of the bags contained many hardcover books — gifts for Bile, who would appreciate them, he was sure. Jeebleh had stashed away much of his cash, a few thousand U.S. dollars in large denominations, in his wallet. He had to bring his money in cash, as there were no functioning banks here. “Tell me more about Bile’s detractors.”

“He still runs The Refuge.”

“What is to criticize about running a refuge?”

“Our country is full of detractors, out to defame the name of anyone ready to do good things,” Af-Laawe responded. “Bile has his fair share of detractors because he is successful at what he’s doing. As a people, we have the penchant for envying achievers, whom we try to bring down to where we are, at the bottom.”

“But tell me more about Bile. Why so much detraction?”

“People question the source of the money with which he set up The Refuge.”

“How did he get the money?”

“His detractors speak of murder and robbery.”

“Bile murdering and robbing?”

“Civil wars have a way of making people behave contrary to their own nature,” Af-Laawe said. “You’d be surprised to know what goes on, or what people get up to. At times, it’s difficult to tell the good from the bad.”

“Not Bile!”

“You have heard about his niece?” Af-Laawe said. “That she’s been abducted, rumor has it, by men related to the people Bile has allegedly murdered and robbed? Supposedly, the kidnappers have said they won’t set his niece and her companion free until he has given back the money he stole, or confesses to having committed the murders.” Af-Laawe watched silently as Jeebleh stared at him with so much distrust spreading over his features.

“A lot of what you’ve told me is news to me,” Jeebleh said, and after a brief pause added, “From what I know, the abductions have a political motive. In fact, I recall reading somewhere that StrongmanSouth, the warlord, is implicated.”

“Where have you read that?”

“In the American press.”

“What do Americans know about things here?”

The man had a valid point, and Jeebleh chose not to challenge him until he knew more. He was silent for a long while, pondering how to continue this conversation. Finally he asked, “Were Raasta and her companion abducted together or separately?”

“Raasta and her playmate, Makka, who has Down’s syndrome, shared a room,” Af-Laawe replied. “They were inseparable. You saw one, you saw the other, you thought of one, you thought of the other too.”

“How’s Bile taking it?”

“He’s devastated.”

Jeebleh shook his head in sorrow, as he remembered reading an article about the abduction in The New York Times. The article had described Raasta as a symbol of peace in war-torn Somalia, the stuff of myth, seen by the city’s residents as a conduit to a harmonious coexistence. Jeebleh could remember parts of the story word for word: “People believe that they will not come to harm if they are in her vicinity; they feel safe from arbitrary murder, from stray bullets or from the pointless death of a mugging. This is why ordinary people seek shelter at The Refuge, where she resides.”

“If Bile just returns the money, will they be set free?”

“There’s no guarantee,” Af-Laawe said.

“Does anyone know who the abductors are?”

But when Jeebleh turned to hear his response, Af-Laawe was gone, and he was face to face with three armed youths. Terror-stricken, he wondered if he had conjured the man, with a little help from a friendly jinni, out of desperate need for a guide to help him navigate the anarchic city.

WHAT BEASTLY MOTIVE DID THESE ARMED YOUTHS HAVE FOR TAKING UP POSITION so close to where he was standing? Nonplussed by their devil-may-care postures and ragged outfits, Jeebleh supposed they were not acting with the authority of the police, who would have had uniforms and badges. He was certain that even if they had been in uniform, they would hardly have looked the part. And in any case, Somalis would not defer to someone simply because of his uniform: he would still be an armed thug trying to maintain authority.

Jeebleh remembered seeing a German play when he was a student in Italy, a play set in Prussia at the end of World War I, in which an ex-convict, with no papers, dons an officer’s uniform. Saluted and deferred to wherever he goes, his every word deemed to contain the voice of authority, he is welcomed everywhere; unlimited credit facilities are extended to him. Somalis never defer to the authority of a uniform in the way the Germans do, Jeebleh thought. We will defer only to the brute force of guns. Maybe the answer lies in the nation’s history since the days of colonialism, and later in those of the Dictator, and more recently during the presence of U.S. troops: these treacherous times have disabused us of our faith in uniformed authorities — which have proven to be redundant, corrupt, clannish, insensitive, and unjust.

Then he heard the word “Passport,” and turning, found himself before a man, neither in uniform nor bearing a gun, who seemed to arrogate authority to himself. Jeebleh looked him slowly up and down, questioning the wisdom of surrendering his passport on the say-so of a total stranger. Yet he dared not ask that the man show him proof of his authority to make such a request. Suddenly Af-Laawe was back, and no sooner had Jeebleh opened his mouth to speak than Af-Laawe broke in, his voice low and firm, advising: “Do as the man says. Give him your passport and twenty U.S. dollars cash. He’ll stamp the passport and return it to you, together with a receipt.”

Was he being set up? And if so, what should he do? Af-Laawe seemed to wield certain power hereabouts, but could he be trusted? And who were the gunmen? Being from New York, the Metropolis of Mistrust, Jeebleh decided not to part with his American passport. He reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out the Somali document, recently issued by the embassy in Rome, and a crisp twenty-dollar bill. He left his American passport where it was, together with the cash, in his wallet. The man leafed through the pages and demanded, “Why do you give me a Somali passport, not at all used, and with no visas in it?”

Jeebleh turned to Af-Laawe, and with a touch of sarcasm addressed both men: “When has it become necessary for a Somali to require a visa to enter Mogadiscio?”

“Is he taking us for fools?” the man protested.

“Please take the twenty dollars,” Af-Laawe told him, “accept his Somali passport, and return it stamped, with a receipt. Pronto!”

For a moment, the man paused, and it seemed he might not be willing to oblige. Af-Laawe pulled him aside and out of Jeebleh’s earshot.

Jeebleh’s thoughts drifted back more than twenty years, to the last time he had used a Somali passport. It had been at the Mogadiscio international airport, about forty kilometers south of here, and he recalled how a man — not in uniform, and without a gun — had taken his passport and disappeared for an eternity. Jeebleh was on his way to Europe, and he worried that he might be prevented from leaving the country, then under the tyrannical rule of the Dictator. Bile and several others, who had apprenticed themselves to Jeebleh politically, had been picked up by the National Security the night before. There was every possibility that, as their mentor, he too would be arrested. And he was.

He had been driven straight from the airport to prison. He was brought before a kangaroo court and sentenced to death. Several years later, he was mysteriously taken from the prison in a National Security vehicle and driven to the VIP lounge of the same airport, where he changed from his prison rags into a suit. He was handed a passport with a one-year Kenyan visa and put on a plane to Nairobi, all expenses paid. Someone whose name he could no longer remember suggested that he present himself at the U.S. embassy. There he was issued a multiple-entry visa for the United States. He still wondered who had done all this for him, and why.

Now, as he waited for Af-Laawe to return, he held the two contradictory images in his mind. In one, he was dressed in a suit, being roughly handcuffed and taken in a security vehicle, sirens blaring, straight to prison; in the other, he was in rags, being driven back to the airport, to be flown to Nairobi. In one, the officers escorting him to prison were crass; in the other, the officers were the epitome of courtesy. That’s dictatorship for you. This is civil war for you!

With every cell in his body responding to his restless caution, he wished he knew where danger lurked, who was a friend and who a foe. He had once been used to the arbitrariness of a dictatorial regime, where one might be thrown into detention on the basis of a rumor. That had been exchanged here for a cruder arbitrariness — a civil anarchy in which one might die at the hands of an armed youth because one belonged to a different clan family from his, if there was even that much reason.

Af-Laawe was back, telling him that his passport would be returned shortly, duly stamped. There was much charm to his lisp, as he commended Jeebleh for having surrendered the Somali document rather than the American one. Jeebleh couldn’t decide whether his self-appointed guide was a godsend or not. Nor could he decide whether the man had hidden motives.

“Any chance of a lift or a taxi?” Jeebleh asked.

“I’ve arranged that already.”

“I see no taxis anywhere.”

“Not to worry, you’ll get a lift,” Af-Laawe assured him.

“Tell me something about yourself in the meantime.”

“There’s very little to tell.”

“Then tell me what little there is.”

“I’m a friend of Bile’s,” Af-Laawe said.

“So it was he who sent you to meet my flight?”

“The pleasure of coming was entirely mine.”

Impressed with the man’s smooth talk, yet frightened by it too, Jeebleh wanted to know how Af-Laawe had managed to survive in this violated city, with his wit and his dignity — or at least his composure — intact. For all that, however, something didn’t add up. Af-Laawe reminded Jeebleh of an actor in a hand-me-down role for which he was ill suited.

“If you won’t tell me anything about yourself,” Jeebleh said, “maybe you can tell me more about Bile, whom I haven’t set eyes on for more than two decades.”

“Everything in due course, please,” the man responded.

Jeebleh wondered whether he should put Af-Laawe’s evasiveness down to discretion, or to the fact that he knew of the bad blood between Bile and Jeebleh, both personal and political, from long before. The bad blood had to do in large part with Bile’s being kept in prison, while Jeebleh had been released and mysteriously put on that plane. It was no surprise people believed that Jeebleh had betrayed the love and trust of his friend.

“Where does Bile live?” Jeebleh asked.

“In the south of the city.”

That Bile chose to base himself in the south of the divided metropolis did not surprise Jeebleh at all. His friend was of the same bloodline as StrongmanSouth, the warlord who ran the territory, supported by clan-based militiamen. Jeebleh was of StrongmanNorth’s clan, but he felt no clan-based loyalty himself — in fact, the whole idea revolted and angered him.

Jeebleh returned to the basics: “Will you help me find a hotel?”

Af-Laawe appeared discomfited. He looked around nervously, seemingly out of his depth, as put-upon as a babysitter asked to take on the responsibility of an absentee parent. Guessing that Af-Laawe knew more than he was prepared to let on, Jeebleh had the bizarre feeling that whoever had sent him had asked that he arrange a lift, but not book him into a hotel. Had Af-Laawe come under someone’s instructions, and if so, whose?

Now Af-Laawe was again conveniently wearing the confident look of a veteran guide, able to steer his charge through to safety. “We will have you taken to a hotel in the north, where we think you will feel safer! You see, in these troubled times, many people stay in the territories to which their clan families have ancestral claims, where they feel comfortable and can move about unhindered, unafraid. However, if you wish, we’ll have you moved eventually to the south, closer to Bile. Possibly Bile himself will invite you to share his apartment, who knows.”

Jeebleh took note of Af-Laawe’s use of “we,” but was unable to determine whether it was a gesture of amicability or whether someone else was involved in the arrangements being made for him. Was this “we” inclusive, in the sense that Af-Laawe was hinting that the two of them belonged to the same clan? Or did Af-Laawe’s “we” take other people into account, others known to be from the same blood community as Jeebleh? “What about Calooshii-Cune?” he asked.

Although Calooshii-Cune — Caloosha for short — was Bile’s elder half brother, he and Jeebleh were of the same clan. Curious how the clan system worked: that two half brothers sharing a mother, like Caloosha and Bile, were considered not to be of the same clan family, because they had different fathers, and that Jeebleh, Bile’s closest friend, was deemed to be related, in blood terms, more to Caloosha, because the two were descended from the same mythic ancestor. For much of the former Dictator’s reign, Caloosha had served as deputy director of the National Security Service. Many people believed that he had been responsible for Bile’s and Jeebleh’s imprisonment, for the death sentence passed on Jeebleh, and also for his eventual, mysterious release. Bile had remained in prison until the state collapsed, when the prison gates were finally flung open.

“Caloosha lives in the northern part of the city,” Af-Laawe said, “near the hotel you’ll be staying in. Say the word, and we’ll be only too pleased to take you to him, any day, anytime.”

Jeebleh was disturbed to learn about Af-Laawe’s intimacy with Caloosha, but wanted to wait until he knew more. “He is all right, Caloosha, is he?”

“He’s a stalwart politician in the north,” Af-Laawe answered, “and on the side acts as a security consultant to StrongmanNorth.”

Rumor mills are busiest, Jeebleh thought, when it comes to politicians with shady pasts. He had gathered, from talking to people and interesting himself in the affairs of the country, that many politicians with dubious connections to the Dictator had found safe havens in the territories where their clansmen formed the majority. The way things stood, Jeebleh should’ve expected that Caloosha would be chummy with StrongmanNorth, who would guarantee him immunity from prosecution for his political crimes. Of course, Jeebleh had no intention of looking Caloosha up, and he did mind staying in a hotel in the north of the city, close to this awful man’s residence. Yet who was he to raise objections about these things now?

“But staying in a hotel in the northern section of the city won’t prevent me from moving about freely, will it?” he asked.

“Crossing the green lines poses no danger to ordinary folks,” Af-Laawe replied. “Unarmed civilians and noncombatants seldom come to harm when crossing the green line. However, the warlords and their associates do not cross the line unless they are escorted by their armed guards.”

“Where do you live?”

“I live in the south.”

“In your own property?”

“No, I’m house-sitting!”

“House-sitting?” Jeebleh had read and heard about questionable dealings when it came to the practice of house-sitting.

“I’ve entered into an arrangement with a family who own a villa and who’ve relocated to Canada since the collapse,” Af-Laawe explained. “An empty villa in civil war Mogadiscio is a liability as well as a temptation. I live in the villa for free and look after it.”

In the local jargon, “house-sitting” meant the taking possession of houses belonging to the members of clan families who had fled, by members of families who had stayed on. Not all house-sitters were squatters, pure and proper. Some lived rent free. Others were paid to look after the properties of people living abroad, who hoped they would find them in good condition to do what they pleased with them once peace had been restored and a central government put in place. Of late, though, there had been a number of cases in which men claiming to be the owners of the properties they were looking after had sold them.

As Jeebleh was about to ask what kind of house-sitter Af-Laawe was, he was gone again, only to reappear with the immigration man in tow. Af-Laawe turned to the man and took the document from him. Then, sounding satisfied, he said, “Let’s see.”

The man bearing his passport wore the pitiful look of a son cut out of a wealthy parent’s will. Maybe he had hoped to receive some baksheesh and was unhappy when he saw he would not. Or maybe there was another reason, indecipherable to Jeebleh. Af-Laawe scrutinized the passport on Jeebleh’s behalf, then handed it to Jeebleh, who put it in his pocket without bothering to open it.

“What about the lift?” Jeebleh asked.

“Give me a few minutes,” said Af-Laawe.

WHILE WAITING, JEEBLEH LOOKED AT THE DISTANT CITY, AND SAW A FINE SEA of sand billowing behind a minaret. He remembered his youth, and how much he had enjoyed living close to the ocean, where he would often go for a swim. Time was, when the city was so peaceful he could take a stroll at any hour of the day or night without being mugged, or harassed in any way. As a youth, before going off to Padua for university — Somalia had none of its own — he and Bile would go to the Gezira nightclub and then walk home at three in the morning, no hassle at all. In those long-gone days, the people of this country were at peace with themselves, comfortable in themselves, happy with who they were.

As one of the most ancient cities in Africa south of the Sahara, Mogadiscio had known centuries of attrition: one army leaving death and destruction in its wake, to be replaced by another and another and yet another, all equally destructive: the Arabs arrived and got some purchase on the peninsula, and after they pushed their commerce and along with it the Islamic faith, they were replaced by the Italians, then the Russians, and more recently the Americans, nervous, trigger-happy, shooting before they were shot at. The city became awash with guns, and the presence of the gun-crazy Americans escalated the conflict to greater heights. Would Mogadiscio ever know peace? Would the city’s inhabitants enjoy this commodity ever again?

From where he stood, the trees were so stunted they looked retarded, and the cacti raised their calluses and thorns in self-surrender, while the shrubs cast only scant shadows. The clouds of dust stirred up by successive armies of destruction eventually settled back to earth, finer than when they went up.

Jeebleh did not look forward to seeing the desolation that he had read and heard about. He was heavy of heart to be visiting his beloved city at a time when sorrow gazed on it as never before. Mogadiscio spread before him, as though within reach of his tremulous hand, a home to people dwelling in terrible misery. A poet might have described Somalia as a ship caught in a great storm without the guiding hand of a wise captain. Another might have portrayed the land as laid to waste, abandoned, the women widowed, the children orphaned, and the sick untended. A third might have depicted it as a tragic country ransacked by madmen driven by insatiable hunger for more wealth and limitless power. So many lives pointlessly cut short, so much futile violence.

“What’s it been like, living in the city?” Jeebleh asked.

Af-Laawe replied with what seemed to Jeebleh a non sequitur. “Danger has a certain odor to it, only there’s very little you can do to avert it between the moment you smell it and the instant death visits.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m smelling danger, that’s what,” Af-Laawe said.

“I don’t understand. Can you smell danger now?” Jeebleh asked.

He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he followed Af-Laawe’s gaze, and saw the three armed youths who had stood guard over him earlier, now in a huddle, mischievously whispering among themselves. And they were also glancing at the stairs of an aircraft being boarded.

“What are they up to?” Jeebleh said.

“I overheard their conversation as I went past them. They were taking bets.”

“What were they betting on?”

“Our city’s armed youths are in the habit of picking a random target at which one of them takes a potshot, then the others aim and shoot, one at a time. It’s a sport to them, a game to play when they are bored. The one who hits the target is the winner.”

“And that’s what they are doing now?”

“I suspect so.”

“Can’t we intervene?”

“I doubt it.”

“What if I talk to them?”

“Why take unnecessary risks?”

“Because somebody has to.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t!”

Before Jeebleh could move, a shot rang out. They heard a woman scream, and then pandemonium. From where Jeebleh stood, it would have been difficult to piece the story together in the correct sequence. Yet it wasn’t long before somebody explained what had happened: the pilot of the Antonov, a Texan, had offered to help the woman, a passenger, carry her plastic containers into the aircraft, and she followed him up the stairs. Perhaps the gunman had aimed at the pilot, who, fortunately for him, stepped out of harm’s way a second before the shot was fired. Or perhaps the woman and her children were going up the steps too slowly and so had become the targets. Whatever the case, the first bullet struck the woman’s elder son. The crowd at the foot of the stairs exploded into panic. Two of the youths trained their guns on anyone who might dare to approach or dare to disarm them. The people cowered, silent, frightened.

The three youths were overjoyed, giving one another high fives, two of them extending congratulations to the marksman. Meanwhile, the woman and her surviving child were screaming so loudly that the heavens might fall. The youths moved slowly, and facing the crowd as if afraid of being shot in the back, clambered into a van, which sped away in a trail of dust. The people moved, as one body, toward the bottom of the stairs where the corpse of the ten-year-old victim lay in a gathering pool of blood.

Was it true, as they said, that in this hellhole of a city, no one did anything for you when you were alive, but when you were dead, everyone would rush to bury you, fast? It was evident from the conversation Jeebleh now overheard that everyone was relieved that the American pilot had not been hit. Jeebleh was shocked that no one in the crowd of people still milling about had been willing to confront the gunmen, to try to stop them from playing their deadly games. And where was Af-Laawe? He had disappeared again. Yes, there he was, climbing the stairs of the aircraft, presumably to help. The woman and her child kept wailing, and Af-Laawe bent over them in an effort to comfort them.

Maybe there was more to Af-Laawe than met the eye. He was shrewd enough, all right, and was resourceful, and courageous too. But was he trustworthy? Was he his own man, or a vassal to one or the other of the Strongmen? It would be atypical, Jeebleh thought, to find in Mogadiscio a man not solely devoted to serving his blood community, but working in pursuit of his own ideals.

An instant later, Jeebleh looked up and saw the first carrion-eaters — strong-headed, keen-eyed, with deadly claws capable of tearing into two disparate halves the surrounding cosmos.

“NO BODY BAGS, PLEASE!”

Those had been the parting words of Jeebleh’s elder daughter as she implored him to take good care of himself. His wife’s advice was simply that he should trust no one. In different circumstances, Jeebleh and Af-Laawe might have struck up an immediate friendship, exchanging telephone numbers, promising to look each other up. Here, however, things were far more complicated. And now this: A ten-year-old boy killed just for fun!

Jeebleh knew it would be unwise to talk about any of this to his wife and daughters, who would ask him to return home immediately. And if he tried to discuss his shock at the crowd’s inaction, his wife would reflexively refer to “the Somalis’ lack of moral courage,” even though, in her heart of hearts, she wouldn’t want him to take a risky moral stand. His elder daughter, a senior at NYU, would tell him that it would be unbecoming of him — a man of such a venerable past, whose life was full of countless instances of moral courage — to die in vain. His younger daughter had speculated that if he was killed, it was unlikely he would be sent back to New York at all. “You’ll just be buried within five minutes of dying. We would never even get to see your corpse. One of us would have to fly to that god-awful country to bring your body back so we could give you a decent burial.” They had opposed his visiting Mogadiscio.

He had heard it all before, the arguments for and against getting involved in any political or moral activity that might lead to death. He remembered his mother fondly, especially because even though he was her only son, she had never once suggested that he shouldn’t risk his life by engaging in dangerous political work, when many parents in the days of the dictatorship discouraged their children from taking a stand. His mother was an exception. “You live only once, and I’d like you to live your life with integrity,” she would say. But he doubted that even she would have wanted him to risk his life unnecessarily in this instance — if, as Af-Laawe said, there wasn’t much he could do.

The arrival of more crows, marabous, and other carrion birds set him loose from his memories. Had these birds learned to show up as soon as they heard shots, knowing that there would be corpses? They perched restlessly on the telegraph wires, waiting. People stood by, looking helpless. Af-Laawe led several men, who carried the dead boy’s corpse to a vehicle with the words “Noolaadaa dhinta!” on the side, and below that the English translation: “Who lives, dies!” When at last Af-Laawe joined him, Jeebleh asked if the van in which the corpse now lay was his.

“It belongs to a charitable organization that gives decent Islamic burials to the unclaimed corpses littering the streets of the city whenever there is fighting,” he said. “I set it up in the early stages of the civil war, when there were bodies everywhere, at roundabouts, by the side of the road, in buildings. A large percentage of the dead had no relatives to bury them. They had belonged to clan families who had been chased out of the city.”

He fell silent, and looked in the direction of a four-wheel-drive vehicle that was arriving, bearing a VIP, perhaps a clan leader or a warlord on his way to Nairobi. Several youths with guns alighted from the roof of the vehicle and others stepped out of it, before an elderly man, whom Jeebleh recognized, emerged limping. A hush descended; even the bereaved woman, now in Af-Laawe’s van, stopped her wailing. Jeebleh, a changed man, was far more frightened than when he had landed. He wished he could pluck up the courage to speak to the venerable politician as he walked toward the plane.

“Now here’s how things are,” Af-Laawe was saying. “I had intended to take you in my van. You can still come with me, only I must warn you that I now have other passengers, including a corpse, a bereaved mother, constantly wailing, and several gravediggers. I am driving straight to the cemetery. Or I can organize a lift for you in that fancy car.”

“What are the chances of that?”

“I’ll talk to the driver. I know him well.”

“And he’ll know where to take me?”

“I’ll tell him.”

Everything was done in haste, because Af-Laawe wanted to get the boy’s body buried before night fell. Before leaving, he gave Jeebleh his business card, which on one side had the words “Funeral with a difference!” and on the other “Noolaadaa dhinta!” Jeebleh found himself thinking that maybe someone with a dark sense of humor was having a bit of fun by sending a funeral van to meet him on his arrival. Only Caloosha would be likely to send him such a veiled message, with a death threat threaded into its cloth. Alas, Jeebleh couldn’t tell whether he should take it lightheartedly, or with the heedfulness of a man being forewarned.

“Good luck,” Af-Laawe said, and he was gone.

2

JEEBLEH WAS UNCOMFORTABLY SQUEEZED IN THE FRONT OF THE VEHICLE, pressed between the driver and a man responding to the title of Major. In the seat immediately behind them were three youths with assault rifles. Perched on the roof were several others with grenade launchers and belt-fed machine guns. That he was uncomfortable sitting so close to so many guns in the hands of teenagers was obvious; he remained alert, and watched for the telltale signs of imminent danger.

As they moved, and once he was accustomed to his discomfort, his eyes fell on a young man lying in the rear. The handsome youth had the whole seat to himself, his right leg, which was in a cast, extended in the dignified attitude of someone showing off a prize possession.

Perhaps mundanely, perhaps revealing more about how much more American he had become than he would care to admit, Jeebleh wished that the driver, the Major, and the youths in the back would all refrain from turning the vehicle into a smokehouse. He kept quiet about his preoccupations, doubtful that they would oblige, and feeling silly that he would expend more energy on their cigarette smoking than on the fact that they were so heavily armed. Instead, he asked the Major where he had been when the state collapsed and the city exploded into anarchy.

The Major replied: “Here and there and everywhere.”

“But you were in the National Army, were you not?”

“How did you decide that?”

“I assumed, because of your title, Major.”

Saying nothing, the Major blew out rings of smoke straight into Jeebleh’s eyes, irritating him no end. The driver sensed the tension building up and stepped in. He addressed his words to Jeebleh. “We’re all shell-shocked on account of what we’ve been through — those of us who stayed on in the country. I hope people like you will forgive us our failings, and we pray to God that He’ll forgive us our trespasses too.”

The Major cursed. “What fainthearted nonsense!”

Minutes passed with only the sound of the engine. The youths engaged in agitated whispers in a hard-to-follow dialect commonly spoken in a southern region of the country where militiamen came from.

“Where do you know Marabou from?” the Major asked.

Jeebleh looked from the Major to the driver and back, as he had no idea what this meant. His lower lip caught in his teeth; biting it, he mumbled, “Marabou?”

The driver helped him out. “‘Marabou’ is the nickname by which the guy who runs Funeral with a Difference is known in some circles of our city.”

“He introduced himself as Af-Laawe,” Jeebleh said.

“And you met him for the first time today?”

When Jeebleh nodded and the driver vouched for him, this angered the Major. He turned on the driver, saying, “Why do you keep speaking for him?”

“Because I’m the one who offered him a lift, that’s why,” the driver said.

And when the Major continued to stare furiously first at him, and then for a considerably longer time at Jeebleh, whipping himself into a giant fury, the driver was compelled to add, “I know this gentleman’s reputation, and of the high respect his name is held in, in many quarters. What’s more, I know this to be their first encounter, because Marabou told me so.”

There was silence.

A few minutes later, the driver said, “I am reminded of a story in which Voltaire, who is on his deathbed, receives a visit from Satan. Eager to recruit the French philosopher for his own ends, Satan offers him limitless pleasures that would make his afterlife more comfortable in every possible way. But Voltaire turns down the offer, and speaks a stern rebuke to Satan, saying that this isn’t the time to make enemies, thank you!”

In a fit of pique, maybe because he had no idea what to make of the parable or why the driver had recounted it, the Major barked a command. “Stop the car!” he shouted.

No sooner had the vehicle come to an abrupt halt than the armed youths leapt from the roof, fanning out, their guns at the ready. But the youths inside did not move at all. On edge, the Major got out.

“Why this unplanned stop?” the driver asked.

Miffed, the Major said, “I’ll return shortly!” He went around to the driver’s side, and told him, “You’re a volunteer, and I’m in charge of this outfit, and you take orders from me. Keep in mind that we’re at war, and I’ll have you come before the disciplinary commission of the movement if you disobey my orders.” Then he swayed off down a dusty road, along with two youths detailed to escort him, their weapons poised menacingly.

“What’s eating him?” asked one of the youths in the vehicle.

The handsome youth with his leg in a cast speculated that the Major was due to go on a dangerous mission, and was living on his nerves.

Everyone retreated into the disarray of an imposed silence, embarrassed. Jeebleh sat unmoving, like a candle just blown out, smoking its last moments darkly.

OUTSIDE, THERE WAS A FAINT WHIRLING OF SAND. AND THERE WAS LIFE AS Jeebleh might have imagined it in its continuous rebirth, earth to dust, dust to earth, wherein death was avenged.

With the vehicle parked by the side of the road and the Major and his young militiamen off on some mysterious mission, Jeebleh felt increasingly like a sitting target. His heart beating faster from fear, it occurred to him that they could all be dead at the pull of a trigger. The dead would be mourned and buried — Marabou would see to that — but the militia would regret the loss of the vehicle more. In the mid-eighties, before the collapse, corruption having reached unprecedented levels, poems had circulated on cassette about the ill-gotten money that had brought many Land Cruisers into the country. Jeebleh wished he could remember the words. Nowadays, many of these four-wheel-drive vehicles had ended up in the hands of the fighting militiamen, who mounted their weapons on them, turning them into the battlewagons that became a staple of the civil war footage shown on CNN and the BBC. He kept a wary eye on what was happening outside, in the dusty alleys. Two of the armed youths who had climbed down from the roof of the vehicle stood with their backs to each other, in imitation of what they must have seen in American movies. They nursed immense bulges in their cheeks, great wads of chewed-up qaat, a moderately mild stimulant. They might have been cattle ruminating.

The driver spoke: “Once again, I feel I must apologize for the behavior of our countrymen, who do not know what is good for them, or how to say thank you to those who mean them well. Our moods swing from one extreme to another, but we haven’t the courage to admit that we’ve strayed from the course of moral behavior. I suppose that is why the civil war goes on and on, because of this lack in us, our inability to appreciate what the international community has tried to do for us: feed the starving and bring about peace in our homeland.”

Jeebleh wanted to know more about Af-Laawe. “What is Marabou’s story?” he asked.

Thunderclouds of worry gathered on the driver’s forehead; readying to speak, he made throaty noises similar in intensity to the rumble before a lightning bolt splits the heavens. “Marabou, for a start,” he finally said, “has many aliases, and he changes them as often as we change our shirts.”

Jeebleh wondered to himself whether Af-Laawe — meaning “the one with no mouth”—was also an assumed name, which, to a Dante scholar, might allude to the Inferno. He asked, “How well do you know him?”

The driver answered in a burst of impassioned speech, “How does one know anyone in a land where people are constantly reinventing themselves? How well can anyone know an Af-Laawe who does his damnedest not to be known?”

“My impression is that you’ve known him a long time.”

“True, I’ve known him for long, since his student days, when he was doing his doctorate in Rome. Then, I was the head of the chancellery at the Somali embassy there. I remember him coming to see me, when he learned that the National Security had put his name on a blacklist and issued a directive instructing us to discontinue his government-sponsored scholarship. Knowing I couldn’t help him, I asked a junior officer to deal with him. He left the chancellery, angry and abusive. A few days later he visited me at home. This time, he pleaded that I extend his passport. I told him that there was no point in extending his passport if he no longer had a scholarship allowing him to live in Italy, but my son assured me that Af-Laawe, who was his friend, had received another grant to help him continue his studies and all he needed was a valid passport, with a valid residence. I renewed the passport, at some risk to myself, I must add, and heard no more about him until I met him several years later in France, with an Italian woman, his fiancée. By then he had set himself up somewhere in Alsace, in a town called Colmar, and he eventually married the woman.”

“And when did he get here?”

“Soon after the U.S. troops flew into Mogadiscio. I’m told he carries French papers now, and speaks several languages. It’s said that he was hired by the European Union at a very high salary, with the vague job description ‘facilitator for all things European.’ He was sent out on some sort of troubleshooting mission, and had a driver, a cook, a bodyguard. He lived in a huge three-story house by himself, testimony to his high-rolling lifestyle.”

“What happened?”

“It’s rumored that together with two other Europeans, a Frenchman and a Norwegian, he effected the disappearance of some four million U.S. dollars from the United Nations coffers. Nobody knows how it was done.”

“Four million dollars?”

“Didn’t you read about it in the American press?”

“I don’t recall anything about this!”

“Rumor has it too,” the driver went on, “that he lost his job with the EU because they suspect him but can’t prove anything. And he doesn’t dare return to Colmar, where his two teenage children and wife live, because the Frenchman and the Norwegian will ask him to hand over their share of the heist. Those in the know think that he was the brain behind it all, and many Mogadiscians assume that the money is buried somewhere in Somalia, and he is the only person who knows where.”

“If the money is here, how come the two Strongmen, or their minions, haven’t forced him to show them where he buried the cash? It seems so incredibly far-fetched, no?”

“Maybe the two Strongmen know things we don’t.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jeebleh.

“Maybe they know the money is already in Europe, deposited in a Swiss bank, and waiting to be signed for, on submission of a coded number,” the driver speculated. “Or maybe they’re waiting until our man joins the Frenchman and the Norwegian who helped him spirit away the UN funds, and then Marabou will collect his cut, and share it out. Maybe an associate of one of the Strongmen is Marabou’s principal protector.”

“Like who?”

“Do you know of Caloosha? His name is often mentioned,” the driver said. “I hear too that Af-Laawe is quite friendly with a brother-in-law of his, who is StrongmanSouth’s deputy. Ours is an incestuous community, and the man has protectors all over the place.”

“What are his links to Caloosha?”

“I wouldn’t know, to be honest.”

The youths inside the vehicle were becoming fidgety, and looked out anxiously in the direction from which they expected the Major to appear. The one with the cast pointed out that as a highly placed officer often entrusted with dangerous missions, the Major ought to know that it wasn’t safe for them to remain stationary in one place for such a long time.

“We’ll give him another minute,” the driver said.

“And then we’ll go,” the youth insisted.

No sooner had the driver turned the key in the ignition than they saw the Major with his escort, carrying something in a plastic bag. Cursing under his breath, he appeared still very edgy as he entered the vehicle. The engine started and the vehicle moved.

3

“WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?” THE DRIVER PUFFED HUNGRILY ON THE cigarette he had lit in a moody silence.

“We had to break the safe,” the Major explained, “because the woman couldn’t find her key. Apparently her old man had taken it with him.”

“The movement is broke and we need to raise funds from the usual sources, our clansmen in the U.S., am I right?”

The Major was on the point of accusing the driver of divulging a secret to a nonclansman, but then his face took on the expression of a man deciding to put aside his differences with another for the sake of peace. Surprisingly, he lapsed into a friendlier mood, even smiling, if a little uneasily. Maybe he had retold himself Voltaire’s admonition while breaking the safe, and had come around to the view that it wasn’t wise to make unnecessary enemies. He turned to face Jeebleh, and asked, “Have you ever met StrongmanSouth?”

“No.”

The Major said, with an odd mix of fear and pride. “I know StrongmanSouth very well.”

“What’s he like?” Jeebleh asked.

“The man is raving mad.”

Jeebleh remained silent and sullen. He had no idea what to expect or where their conversation might lead.

“And you know what?” the Major went on.

‘What?”

“For his breakfast, he eats cakes of soap.”

Jeebleh wanted to remain silent, but couldn’t help himself. “Why in God’s name would he do that?”

“To prove that he’s tough!”

Jeebleh caught a glimpse of the Major’s rage rising and felt he might explode any minute; he looked at the driver, hoping he would step in to calm things. And it appeared as if he might do just that, but then he seemed to change his mind, and he too remained quiet.

The Major was now raving. “I’ve known StrongmanSouth for what he is for years — a lunatic with a madcap notion of what he can achieve. I served under him in the Ogaden War. I know him to be a pushover, and that’s why I am not afraid of him. In fact, he’s no trouble at all. Never mind the myth that’s been built around his name by his clansmen and supporters.” He threw his cigarette butt out of the window, and turned to Jeebleh as if expecting him to applaud. “He invaded our territory, conquered it. His ragtag militiamen rape our women, his clansmen have helped themselves to our farms. He’s turned our ancestral land into an extension of his power game, and we’re part of his bargaining strategy when the different interest groups come to the national reconciliation tables to set up an all-inclusive government. I keep telling my men that no one is able to rule over a people if they’re prepared to fight. We’re ready to kill, we’re ready to die until our ancestral territories are back in our hands.”

When the Major fell silent, the relief was not just Jeebleh’s. They felt it all round, and took it in with a fine dose of the dust coming in through the window, cracked open because of the heat.

“To someone like you,” the Major started up again, “we’re all nuts, we’re ranting mad. You probably think we’re all fighting over nothing of great importance. You’ll say, ‘Look, your country is in ruins, and you keep fighting over nothing.’ Those of us who’ve stayed on and participated in warring against the invaders of our territories feel maligned. We feel belittled when those of you who left, who have comfortable jobs, and houses with running water and electricity, somewhere else, where there is peace, speak like that. Has it ever occurred to you that some of us carry our guns, as the good everywhere must bear arms, to fight and die for justice?”

“But what makes you think that I believe you’re fighting over nothing of great importance? I’ve said no such thing.”

“I’ve met and heard many like you!”

Jeebleh chose not to answer and looked away.

The Major continued: “We’re fighting for a worthy cause, the recovery of our territory. We’re fighting against our oppressors, who’re morally evil, reprehensibly blameworthy, every one of them. I see StrongmanSouth as evil for wanting to impose his wicked will on our people.”

Jeebleh knew a lot more than he was prepared to let on, knew that the Major’s armed movement was engaged in acts equally reprehensible as those of StrongmanSouth’s militia, knew too that, as part of its policy to gain total control of the region, it had “cleansed” its ancestral territory of those hailing from other regions. From what Jeebleh had read, the leaders of the movement to which the Major and the driver belonged condoned the killing of innocent people who belonged to other clan families with ancestral memories different from theirs. Jeebleh considered the acts of all these armed movements immoral. Even so, he doubted there was any point engaging the so-called leaders in debate.

“Why are you here, anyway?” the Major demanded.

“Just visiting,” Jeebleh replied.

“Who’re you visiting?”

Jeebleh took his time before responding, because he didn’t like the Major’s aggressive tone. To calm himself, he studied the early hints of darkness coming at them in waves, and enjoyed this intimation of his first night in Somalia descending. His silence made the Major more impatient; he insisted on his question. “Are you visiting anyone in particular?”

“I’m visiting my mother’s grave,” Jeebleh said quickly.

But he felt ridiculous even to himself as soon as the words had left his lips. Granted, there was no gainsaying the fact that he had intended to call at his mother’s grave, but he had planned to achieve other things during his visit, including a good air-clearing session with Bile about their unfinished business. He saw the Major and the driver exchange knowing glances; both looked at Jeebleh and then back at each other.

“Did your mother die recently?” the driver asked.

“Close to nine years ago.”

“She died without you having seen her for years?”

Jeebleh nodded.

“Any idea where she’s buried?”

“None whatsoever.”

“During the last few years,” the driver said, “a lot of terrible things have been done both to the memory of the living and to the spirit of the dead. I’m glad you’ve come on a visit to ennoble her memory, and honor it. Even though, if I permit myself to be cynical for a moment, your mother was fortunate to die when she did. This way she was spared many of the horrors of the civil war.”

“How will you find her grave?” asked the Major.

“I am pinning my hopes on my mother’s housekeeper and caretaker, who will most probably know where she is buried,” Jeebleh said. But, he revealed, he had no idea how to find the housekeeper, who was actually in his employ, in that he paid her salary in the form of monthly remittances from America, directly into her account in Mogadiscio. Jeebleh was sure the housekeeper held the key to many secrets, and he was eager to talk with her.

“Don’t you have any blood relations in the city who might know?” the Major asked.

Although he was tempted, Jeebleh chose not to talk about his motive to visit, or admit that he was hoping he might be able to locate his mother’s story in the context of the bigger national narrative. So he kept it simple: “There are no surviving relations that I know of, or that I’m in touch with. But I have a couple of friends I plan to look up, and I’m pretty sure they’ll help in leading me to where my mother is buried.”

“How odd!” The Major sounded shocked.

“What?”

“I cannot believe that you have friends in the city, but no surviving blood relations.” He repeated the word “friends,” pronouncing it with a mocking distaste. “This is what America does to you.”

“What’s America done to me?”

“It’s made you forget who you are.”

“No, it hasn’t.”

“You’ll see for yourself when you’ve been here for a couple of days that there are no longer ‘friends’ you can trust, anywhere in this country,” the Major asserted. “Here we don’t think of ‘friends’ anymore. We rely on our clansmen, on those sharing our ancestral blood.”

“I find it hard to believe that you don’t have friends,” Jeebleh said.

“Only a fool not in touch with the realities of this country and our current history would insist on placing ‘friends’ above the station occupied by blood relations.”

The driver shook his head. “I don’t agree with you, my dear cousin,” he said. “You and I know that even in the worst times of the civil war, many of us have been saved, given shelter, and then helped to safety by our friends.”

“This is no longer the case, and you know it!” the Major replied. “Let’s not kid ourselves with these and other lies. Nor is it that this fellow doesn’t have any surviving blood relations here — he has plenty of them. Only he chooses to have nothing to do with them, believing they’ll relieve him of his American money, which he doesn’t wish to share with them. He thinks our reliance on blood kinship is backward and primitive. He is saying that he has money, that his family is safe and in America, that he belongs to the twenty-first century, while we belong to the thirteenth. Can’t you see what he’s saying?”

The driver said, “No, I can’t.”

“He’s saying that we’re backward fools, because we think of our kinsmen. Listen to him. He’s here not to visit the country or some relations, but to call at his mother’s grave. And on his way to her tomb, he’ll make the time to look up a couple of his old friends. He’s a modern man. We’re primitive, we have our heads in the sand.”

The militiaman with the cast said, “I think he should go to the south of the city, where they’re all crazy, to look for his mother’s grave. I agree with the Major, there’s something wrong with this man!”

The driver winced like a parent in whose presence a child has been rude to a guest.

The Major now launched into a new tirade on how people like Jeebleh were on show-off visits “as false as their teeth.” He devoted a few enraged remarks to their mannerisms, their clothes, their shoulder bags, the Samsonites-on-wheels in which they carried steam irons with which to press their stonewashed jeans. “The man is here to be gawked at,” he said. “You can bet he left America after paying a visit to his dentist, who scoured his mouth for possible repairs, and after calling on his physician, who prescribed his tablets against malaria. A tangle of pretenses, that’s what he is!”

He paused for a moment, but he wasn’t done with Jeebleh. He turned to the driver and said, “Ask him who his friends are, since he has no blood relations in the land. Ask him.”

Jeebleh was silent, but the driver answered the Major: “I suggest you lay off!”

Midway through the last rant, Jeebleh had decided not to rise to the Major’s provocation, because he felt apprehensive. It worried him that he thought of the Major as someone behaving like a damaged person who placed his own inherent failures at the center of his self-censure, and who laid all blame at someone else’s door. But he knew this notion wasn’t right, and he didn’t like the fact he was thinking it. Instead, Jeebleh eavesdropped on the conversation coming from behind him and was shocked to hear so much hate pouring forth from the militiamen, directed at StrongmanSouth and his tattered army that had laid their region to waste. Jeebleh looked for a long time at the wounded youth, with as much pained empathy as he could muster.

The driver jumped into the opportunity the silence had afforded him to change the subject, telling Jeebleh, “Our young warrior in the back stepped on an antipersonnel mine buried by StrongmanSouth’s militiamen in a corridor of the territory we control. In the opinion of the surgeon in Nairobi, he was lucky to get away with injuries only to his leg — he could’ve been blown sky high.”

It grieved Jeebleh to note that many of the militiamen laying down their lives in the service of the madness raging all around were mere children. It pained him too that those in the vehicle with him were so full of adult-inspired venom, their every third word alluding to vengeance, to death, and to shedding more enemy blood. They had lost their way between the stations of childhood and manhood. To judge from their conversation, many of them preferred dying in the full glory and companionship of their kin to being alive, lonely and miserable. Jeebleh remembered what Oscar Wilde said: that simply because someone is willing to die for a cause doesn’t make the cause just.

The Major said, “What do you, in America, think of us?”

It dawned on Jeebleh that there was something doglike about the Major: his tongue in a mouth forever ajar, throbbing with deadly menace. But after studying it for a few moments, he decided that the tongue hung out not like a dog’s, but like laundry left on the line to dry.

“It’s very hard to judge from there. I’ve come here to learn and to listen,” Jeebleh said.

“Then there’s hope for us yet!”

“In some ways, I admit things were a lot clearer when I was last here, in the days of the dictatorship. But despite everything, and despite the prevailing obfuscation, I’ve come to assess the extent of my culpability as a Somali.”

And he imagined seeing corpses buried in haste by his kinsmen, the palms of the victims waving as though in supplication. Similar images had come to him, several times, in the comfort of his home, in New York, and on one occasion, in Central Park, he had been so disturbed that he had mistaken the stump of a tree for a man buried alive, half his body in, the other half out. This was soon after he had watched on television the corpse of an American Ranger being dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadiscio. Those images had given him cold fevers for months. Now he felt the strange sensation of a many-pronged invasion, as if his nightmares were calling on him afresh. His throat smarted, as with an attack of flu coming on.

Abruptly the Major again gave the order for the car to stop. As before, the young gunmen dismounted from the vehicle’s roof and took up positions facing the shanties at the roadside and spreading out fast, covering every possible angle. The Major got out and beckoned to several of them, and gave them instructions in a self-important way. He bid Jeebleh farewell, saying, “I hope you find your mother’s grave!”

He vanished into the village, one armed youth ahead of him, another behind, and two others on either side — a VIP with his own security detail, presumably on his way to the money changer’s.

“SO, YOU AND THE MAJOR DIDN’T EXACTLY HIT IT OFF,” THE DRIVER SAID.

There were half a dozen people left in the vehicle, including the wounded youth in the back. The driver did not move off right away, but waited for the Major’s escorts to return. The engine kept running; everyone was now more relaxed.

“Is he on a dangerous mission?”

Jeebleh took it that the driver knew the Major better than he was prepared to let on, and gathered from the man’s body language that he was comfortable in Jeebleh’s presence. But would he take him into his confidence, tell him things?

The driver spoke, his voice almost a whisper. “When he was in the National Army, he was trained in intelligence gathering and sabotage. Now he’s been assigned to sneak into the area controlled by StrongmanSouth, where he’ll do a couple of jobs. I’ve no idea what these are, because I have no clearance.”

Jeebleh remembered reading about the region that the driver, the Major, and these youths came from: their ancestral territory had been turned into a battleground between bloodthirsty warlords. Many of the people had fled their towns and villages, fearful of being caught up in the fighting or of being massacred by drug-crazed militiamen on instructions to do as much damage as possible. The area had become known as the Death Triangle.

When the youths returned from having done their escort duty, the driver announced that he was ready to move. But no sooner had he done so than an argument erupted among the militiamen, those who had been on the roof insisting that they exchange places with those inside: Voices were raised; triggers were touched; death threats were made. Jeebleh prayed, Oh God, please, no shooting! He feared, for the second time since his arrival, that he might die in a mad shoot-out involving hapless youths.

Against the driver’s advice, he stepped out of the vehicle, injudiciously volunteering to sit on the roof with the youths on guard duty. To his relief, his ploy worked, because those on the roof consented to remain there — as one of them put it, “for the time being, in honor of our guest.”

Jeebleh had barely pulled the door shut when he heard one of the youths on the roof lashing out at those inside for being favored by the Major, to whom as cousins they were closer than the youth was. Admitted into the intricacies of kinship, Jeebleh learned that the Major was in fact showing preference to his cousins, whom he kept close to himself, inside the vehicle and farther from danger, whereas he assigned roof duty to those more removed. For Jeebleh, this proved clearly that the family thread woven from a mythical ancestor’s tales seldom knitted society into a seamless whole. He assumed that the driver and the wounded warrior had stayed out of the dispute because their subclan was loyal to an altogether different set of bloodlines.

Once peace had been at least temporarily restored between the youths, the vehicle was on the move again, but not for long. The driver, as courteous as ever, apologized for the time it was taking to arrive at Jeebleh’s hotel. “It won’t be long now,” he added.

“Where are we?” Jeebleh asked.

“We are in the north of the city, where our clanspeople have relocated to, having fled because of StrongmanSouth’s scorched-earth policy,” the driver said.

The vehicle had scarcely come to a halt when Jeebleh noticed a change in the behavior of the militiamen. They showed a united front to the hordes of men, women, and children who came from the shanties all around. There was a lot of mingling, a lot of primordial rejoicing. As he watched the shambling efforts at camaraderie, Jeebleh thought nervously about the ingrained mistrust between the youths, who belonged to different subclans, and about the unreleased violence that stalked the people of the land: friends and cousins one instant, sworn foes the next.

From inside, Jeebleh looked on as a woman in some kind of nurse’s uniform instructed a group of teenagers how to lift the wounded fighter out of the vehicle. The teenagers were rough-hewn in speech and manner, and struck Jeebleh as being careless, picking the wounded youth up like a sack of millet, despite the nurse’s warnings—“Careful, careful!” Jeebleh was reminded of inexperienced furniture movers taking an eight-legged table out of a small room into a bigger one through a tiny door.

The driver, waiting, kept the engine running.

JEEBLEH WAS SAD THAT THE NIGHT HAD FALLEN SO RAPIDLY, AS TROPICAL nights do. He was sad that he took no account of it, when he had wanted to remain alert, from the instant he first remarked that it was coming at them in a series of waves. He wished he were able to tell the meaning of the stirrings in the darkness outside, a darkness that was imbued with what he assumed to be Mogadiscio’s temperamental silence. Jeebleh heard a donkey braying, heard an eerie laughter coming to them from the mournful shanty homes. He had looked forward to the twilight hour, had been prepared to welcome it, hug it to himself, but when it did come he hadn’t been aware of it.

As they moved, Jeebleh, with nothing better to do, pulled at his crotch to help lift the weight off his balls. From the little he had seen so far, the place struck him as ugly in an unreal way — nightmarish, if he dignified what he had seen of it so far with an apt description. Most of the buildings they drove past — he had known the area well; Bile’s mother had had a house hereabouts once — appeared gutted; the windows were bashed in, like a boxer who had suffered a severe knockout; the glass panes seemed to have been removed, and likewise the roofs. In short, a city vandalized, taken over by rogues who were out to rob whatever they could lay their hands on, and who left destruction in their wake. Jeebleh’s Mogadiscio was orderly, clean, peaceable, a city with integrity and a life of its own, a lovely metropolis with beaches, cafés, restaurants, late-night movies. It may have been poor, but at least there was dignity to that poverty, and no one was in any hurry to plunder or destroy what they couldn’t have. He doubted if there was enough space in people’s minds for the pleasures he had enjoyed when living in Mogadiscio.

“I feel embarrassed that my colleague was rude to you in my presence,” the driver said. “I cannot apologize enough. Kindly forgive us!”

“I suppose I should’ve said to the Major that I had returned to reemphasize my Somaliness — give a needed boost to my identity,” Jeebleh said tentatively. “Do you think that would’ve made any sense to him?”

“I doubt that it would have.”

“To tell you the truth, I was fed up being asked by Americans whether I belonged to this or that clan,” Jeebleh continued, “many assuming that I was a just-arrived refugee, fresh from the so-called clan fighting going on in our country. It’s irritating to be asked by people at the supermarket which clan I belong to. Even the colleagues I’ve known for years have been lousy at secondguessing how I felt about clan identity and my loyalty to it. You see, we Somalis who live in America, we keep asking one another where we stand on the matter of our acquired new American identity. I’ve come because I want to know the answers. I also wanted to visit these heat-flattened, sunburned landscapes, and see these shantytowns, witness what’s become of our city.”

When he had finished speaking, Jeebleh relished the quiet drive, the silence of the hour, the fact that there was no fighting, no guns firing, no traffic in the roads. He could hear voices, but they weren’t threatening or frightening. The night they were plunging into extended a hand of welcome. Would that he could challenge his demons of despair, if these got in touch. On this trip, his life felt like it was on a mezzanine suspended between a floor marked “Ennui” and another marked “Hope.” While he knew that anything could happen, he was determined to do his utmost not to end up in a body bag, or in an overpriced coffin addressed to his wife and daughters, care of a funeral agency with a zip code in Queens, New York.

The driver said, “I’ll give you my telephone number so you can call me when you need to. And please don’t hesitate to get in touch if there’s anything I can do to help.”

“It’s very kind of you.”

The vehicle stopped in front of a hotel gate. The driver applied the hand-brake, turned to Jeebleh, and announced, “Here we are!”

4

JEEBLEH TOOK NOTE THAT THE GROUNDS OF THE HOTEL WERE MARKED off from the street by a large sign, handwritten in Somali, Arabic, English, and Italian, warning that no one bearing firearms would be allowed onto the premises.

At the sound of the horn, the gate opened slowly, and his gaze settled on two men, neither, evidently, with a gun. One of the men appeared to have only one arm, while the other was distinguished by an enormous pair of buckteeth, bright white against an otherwise obscure face.

Above the gate, up in the heavens, the sky was soaked in the blood of sacrifice: it reminded Jeebleh of the Somali myth in which the sun is fed daily, at dusk, on a slaughtered beast. He remembered being told, as a child, that the routine of feeding the sun daily at the same hour made her return for food the following day. Now that he had gained his adulthood and come back to this fragmented land, he lamented the tragic absence of a hero worthy of elevation to solar eminence. He might have been at the gate of prehistory, because the quickening darkness of the hour dyed the visible world with the dim color of yet other uncertainties. Would he be safe at this hotel? Did it have running water? How intermittent was its electricity?

Of the two men at the gate, OneArm advanced with the wariness of a chameleon, once all the militiamen had gotten down from the roof of the vehicle. He was so dark he might have been woven out of the night. He moved around the vehicle in the stylized goose-step of a sentry on duty. “No guns, please,” he told the driver, who assured him that neither he nor Jeebleh was armed.

Bucktooth stayed behind, focused with reptilian attentiveness on every possible movement, his right hand in his pocket — maybe because a firearm was hidden there. The gate firmly in his grip, he kept half of his body out of immediate danger in the event of a shoot-out.

His hands on his lap, Jeebleh was a study in concentration. He was totally taken with Bucktooth, who seemed intent on outstaring him and the driver — until they conceded defeat, and showed their hands, palms forward. In fact, Jeebleh probably would have felt bothered and offended if he had been treated differently from anyone else.

As the gates opened fully to let the vehicle through, Jeebleh was touched by an instant of remorse as the minute hands of his destiny gathered the hours of his emotion. He looked forward eagerly to calling his wife and daughters in New York, to assure them that all was well with him so far; he felt a surge of anticipatory elation.

The driver parked under the glow of a fluorescent tube with a crowd of moths around it. Jeebleh got out, and took two steps before tottering to an unsteady stop: his toes had curled up in an awful cramp. While he was stretching his legs and retraining his feet to walk, two youths, presumably bellboys, not in uniforms but in sarongs, grabbed hold of his bags, and went ahead inside.

He bid the driver farewell and, even though he didn’t think he would ever get around to calling him, wrote down his telephone number and thanked him profusely. Then he followed the youths, into an enclosed area where there were tables and chairs. He could not be absolutely certain, but it was possible that he took leave of his senses for a few exhausted seconds, during which he may not have known who he was, where he was, or what on earth he was doing there.

COMING TO, HE CAST ABOUT FOR A SOLID ANCHOR AND SOON SPOTTED A rather rotund man, with a cuddly look about him, struggling to heave himself out of a threadbare chair. He was tempted to offer the man a hand, but thought better of it when he saw him extricating himself from the deep chair and straightening up, then coming forward, his right hand outstretched. He was not the handsomest of men: his mouth protruded, boasting teeth that might have been molded out of soapstone, and his lower lip curved in the unlikely shape of a kilt of clouds covering the southern half of a full moon. The man introduced himself as the manager. Jeebleh was comforted when he shook the man’s fleshy palm. “Welcome,” the manager said. “I hope everything has been smooth and comfortable since your arrival.”

The accumulated horrors of the scene at the airport, the stress of meeting so many strangers in a city virtually alien, and now the necessity of staying in a hotel — these were taking their toll on Jeebleh, unnerving him, and making him lose his general equilibrium. Lest he should speak impulsively and say whatever came into his mind, he remained silent.

“Welcome home, our bitter home!” said the man, reading into Jeebleh’s silence. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his baggy trousers, in which you could hear the jingle of colliding coins. (Jeebleh wondered what manner of coins these might be, and assumed they were not Somali, considering the high rate of inflation: a dollar was exchanging nowadays for thousands of shillings; when he had left for the United States, it had been worth six.) “I am Ali!”

Ali offered a belated smile, as if now remembering that he had been trained to please his customers. “In an earlier life, in long-ago peacetime Somalia, I used to be the favorite of gossip columnists and the envy of other hotel managers,” he told Jeebleh. “I was appreciably more adept than any other hotel manager at getting the best of jobs. In my day, I played host to several kings of the petrodollar variety, not to mention a handful of African presidents on visits to Mogadiscio, and the secretaries-general of the UN, the Organization of African Unity and the Arab League too. And even though I am suitably qualified to run hotels anywhere in the world, having taken a degree in hotel management in England, I’ve chosen to stay. We are the sons of the land, to which we belong, you and I. I feel no regrets, though, none whatsoever.”

Jeebleh suspected he knew what Ali meant when he said, “We are the sons of the land.” He understood the manager’s “we” to be inclusive: Jeebleh, Ali, and many other known but unnamed clansmen of theirs, united in blood. But was he right to interpret it this way?

“Why have you chosen to stay?” he asked.

“I have a bedridden mother to look after.”

And here he was, Jeebleh, come to pacify his mother’s troubled spirits. Yet he couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to say, No regrets, none whatsoever.

“Anyway,” the manager continued, “we’ve been alerted to your coming, and we are at your service, to offer you our best.”

“Who alerted you to my coming?”

“A good friend of yours.”

“A good friend of mine?”

“Af-Laawe.”

Jeebleh let this pass unchallenged. Moreover, he purposefully radiated a false sense of confidence, if only to prove to the manager that he was on top of things. He thrust his chin forward and asked, “Where are my bags?”

For a moment, because he had no idea where the bags had ended up, the manager cut an undignified posture; but he was quick in setting things right. He summoned the tallest of the bellboys and inquired what had become of the gentleman’s bags. Another bellboy in a sarong informed them that he had taken the gentleman’s bags to “the suite.”

“Now for the formalities, if you don’t mind.” The personification of courtesy, Ali placed a pen on top of some forms and pushed them toward Jeebleh.

“Would you like to see my passport?” Jeebleh asked.

“There’s no need.”

Jeebleh completed the forms in haste. The words for date and place of birth, sex, marital status, and permanent address were in Italian, and spelled incorrectly; the paper was so dry it felt to Jeebleh as if it would break if he tried to fold it; and some of the spaces he was supposed to fill in already bore pencil markings. When he had finished, and was preparing to go up to his suite, he heard Ali say, “Please do not judge us too harshly!”

“But of course not,” Jeebleh replied.

“Times were”—Ali gestured out toward the gates, toward OneArm and Bucktooth—“when you knew who was bad and who was good. Such distinctions are now blurred. We are at best good badmen, or bad badmen.”

Because he wanted to create a small measure of trust, Jeebleh blundered forward. “Do you know Bile?” he said.

“He’s a good man.”

“What’s the latest about Raasta?”

“Nothing, so far that I’ve heard.”

As Jeebleh took his leave politely, half nodding, the manager asked, “Would you like to get in touch with Bile?”

“There’s time for everything,” Jeebleh answered.

A bellboy escorted him to his suite.

“SUITE” WAS A MISNOMER, GIVEN THE ROOM’S SIZE AND ITS AMENITIES. AND now that Jeebleh was alone, the demons were back. His agitation was due, in part, to a lack of clarity in his mind — how to define himself here. His difficulty lay elsewhere, in his ability to choose whom he would associate himself with. He was somehow sure that Ali knew that Bile was his childhood friend, but not a fellow clansman. Jeebleh revisited his earlier exchanges with the Major, a barking dog penned in a kennel with many others like him, helplessly damned. It had been one thing talking to the Major, who thought of him as an outsider; it was altogether another to be in the company of the manager, with his inclusive “we”! What was he to do? Spurn Ali, who wished to relate to him, or welcome the inclusion, and yet keep a discreet distance, for his life might in the end depend on it?

He thought of how it was characteristic of civil wars to produce a multiplicity of pronominal affiliations, of first-person singulars tucked away in the plural, of third-person plurals meant to separate one group from another. The confusion pointed to the weakness of the exclusive claims made by first-person plurals, as understood implicitly in the singled-out singular. He remembered a saying, “Never trust a self-definer, because an ‘I’ spoken by a self-definer is less trustworthy than a she-goat in the habit of sucking her own teats,” and it made good sense when he thought about how Somalis drove him crazy with their abuse of pronouns, now inclusive, now exclusive.

Pronouns aside, he felt alienated from himself, as though he had become another person, when he witnessed the brutal murder of the ten-year-old boy earlier. Thank God, that sense of alienation lasted a mere moment or two, making him wonder whether he was not the he who had left Nairobi earlier that day. Why were the demons making him engage in a discourse of the mad, a discourse marked by pronominal detours?

He was ill at ease with the kind of discourse drawn from the obsession with pronouns. Take that inclusive “we.” Assume, he told himself, that Ali, presumably a clansman of his, kills someone. Wouldn’t the family whose son had been murdered take vengeance and murder, for instance, Jeebleh? Was he, as a member of a clan family, responsible for the murders committed in the name of a shared “we”? And what of the claim that violence is cathartic, capable of making people get to know one another in a deeper way, just as a person comes closer to knowing others in times of disaster?

He was sure that he did not love Somalia the way he used to love it many years before, because it had changed. Maybe love did not enter into one’s relationship with one’s country? Maybe nostalgic patriotism demanded its own brand of flag-waving? Was he back in the country to refurbish his emotions about Somalia with fresher affections? Can one continue to love a land one does not recognize anymore? He had never asked himself whether he loved America. He loved his wife and daughters, and through them, he was engaged with America.

He took an intent look around the room in search of a secret place where he might hide his valuables, certain — although he hadn’t asked — that the hotel had no working safe. The room contained the minimum essentials: a single bed, evidently hastily made; a bedspread covering it, color discreet indigo; a bedside table with a lamp; a washstand with a jug below. Also, a threadbare facecloth, a bidet to the right of the stand, and near it, a plastic kettle. The kettle reminded him that he was back in an Islamic country, where one performed the rite of ablution several times a day.

He thought ahead, imagining that a hotel employee had stolen his valuables. Caught and found guilty, the thief would lose his hands. Jeebleh was distressed, because he didn’t want to confront the hard realities of today’s Somalia — where the limbs of the small fry are amputated, while the warlords are treated with deference. He pulled out the wallet holding his cash, and felt the freshness of the dollar bills between his fingers. His whole body shook at the thought of receiving an amputated hand as compensation. He replaced the cash in his wallet, and pulled out his toiletry bag.

Because he hadn’t expected to find a safe in a Mogadiscio hotel, he had resorted to making his own, in the safety of his hotel in Nairobi. He was a needle-and-thread man, and seldom traveled anywhere without a sewing kit. He had picked up the habit of darning during his years in jail. In fact, his study at home in New York was replete with all kinds of threads — cotton, silk, nylon and other synthetics, and a sewing machine, an ancient Singer, received as a Christmas present from his mother-in-law. With a reel of nylon thread, a pair of scissors, and a needle, he had made a false bottom for his toiletry bag, covering the visible part with waterproof material. He now had a space big enough to hide things in once he arrived in Mogadiscio.

He unloaded his toiletries onto the bed, and made sure the inner flap of the bag had been strengthened sufficiently. He was pleased with what he had done in Nairobi. Now he peeled off enough cash for his immediate needs, and put the remainder and his U.S. passport in the envelope into the false bottom of the bag. Then he replaced the toiletries in it, and left it conspicuously unzipped and in full view on the washstand, in the hope that no thief would suspect the bag to contain anything of value. As part of his strategy of deception, he triple-locked the closets, which contained nothing but his few clothes; he hoped to mislead any intruder.

He took a bucket shower quickly and methodically. Then he went out, in search of something to eat.

SEVERAL YOUTHS IN SARONGS WERE STANDING AROUND THE LOBBY. BEHIND the counter at the reception desk was an older man, more formally dressed; he appeared to be in charge of the desk. Jeebleh didn’t think the man was familiar with the etiquette of hotel business. He was crude, picking his nose and speaking rather loudly to the young men. When he made no move to ask whether he might be of some assistance, Jeebleh assumed that he was a relation of the hotel owner, newly arrived from the rural areas. Eventually a youth who described himself as a runner came forward and offered his help, saying, “We run errands for the guests. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“I would like to eat,” Jeebleh said.

“What do you want?” the youth replied. “There’s a restaurant close by.”

“What’s available?”

“Steak, other types of meat, spaghetti.”

“Spaghetti and salad?” Jeebleh doubted very much that he would eat more than a mouthful or two: he was worried that his stomach might act up, something it was prone to do. Not wanting to trust the runner with a large U.S. banknote, he lied, saying, “But I don’t have cash.”

“Don’t worry. You can pay later.” And without waiting for further instructions or Jeebleh’s confirmation, the youth ran off.

Alone in the courtyard, Jeebleh was struck by the night’s beauty, and gave himself time to admire its starry quality. His gaze fell on a tree in the distance, silhouetted by moonlight, and he was startled to notice a human figure wrapped in a subdued gray, sitting under the tree. The shape seemed detached from both time and space, reminding him of a well-trodden floor and a tableau vivant. He assumed he was looking at a woman, age indeterminate. Somehow, the woman’s figure evoked in him a funereal sorrow. Moving closer, he realized that there were in fact two women, sitting so close to each other that their veils merged and became one. They were so still for such a long time, neither speaking, that he thought of two cows sharing a scratching post. He had never examined these veils closely. They were less elaborate than the ones commonly worn by Yemeni women when he had lived in Mogadiscio.

Then he heard a man’s voice. When he turned around, the manager was standing in front of him. “A breathtaking sight, isn’t it?” Ali said. “Just look at how beautiful the night can be in a place that’s otherwise dreadful!”

And Jeebleh looked back up at the sky, which lay solemn in the placidity of its own composure, the stars a-scatter like maize kernels thrown into greedy disarray by two hens quarreling. He agreed: “The sky is divine!”

“I wouldn’t put it past StrongmanSouth to get it into his head that it’s time he owned the skies too,” the manager said. “Then we’ll all be in deeper trouble.”

In the pause that followed, Jeebleh was unable to say much, still shaken by the image of two women merging into one. He and Ali walked back to a table surrounded by chairs. Jeebleh asked, “What manner of veils do Somali women wear these days?”

“A lot has changed since you were last here.”

“I don’t remember these.”

The manager explained that the influence came from the heartland of Islamic fundamentalism, from societies such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, where knowledge about the faith was essentialist, or Saudi Arabia, where the people were traditionalist. He described how the “robes” were made from two widths of black material sewn together into a kind of a sack, with sleeves that were equal in width to the length of the gown. They had a face veil, consisting of a long strip of poplinette that concealed the whole face except for the eyes. The robe covered the woman from the tip of her forehead to her ankles.

“Well, I never!” Jeebleh said.

“How long have you been away?” the manager asked.

“Far too many years.”

The manager looked away, stared down at his hands, and said nothing.

Peace was a luxury expressed in an evening’s beauty, Jeebleh thought, in the calm into which a cricket chirps, into which the owl hoots.

“Has there been much fighting lately?” he asked.

“Every now and then,” Ali said. “When there is fighting, our evenings become very ugly and we hear nothing, not even the heart of our fear.”

“And the point to the fighting?”

“I don’t see any point to much of it.”

“But the entire nation is held for ransom,” Jeebleh said, mostly to himself and the quiet night.

Then he heard a scuttle coming from behind them: two geckos bickering over supremacy or rats, he couldn’t tell. He looked at the wall behind him, at the space ahead of him. Alas, he couldn’t make out who or what had made the sound, no matter how hard he tried. To a frightened man, he thought, everything appears strange, and every noise poses some threat.

The youth arrived, carrying two aluminum plates, one on top of the other, together containing a runny meal. Jeebleh had no idea why the youth had brought him a steak, or why it was drowned in the sauce it had been cooked in. He hoped it was freshly cooked, not warmed up several times over. The fried potatoes were soggy and inedible, and the steak tougher than the hoof of the cow slaughtered to produce it. The manager sat forward, and made as though he might launch into a lengthy explanation. Jeebleh waited, his fork raised, mouth in a grimace. He took a bite of a sodden potato, then a tougherthan-thou bite of steak. It was possible that his grim countenance dampened the manager’s intentions.

“Do you know the driver with whom I came from the airport?” Jeebleh asked.

“He was no driver in the ordinary sense of the term,” said the manager.

“What’re you saying?”

“Don’t be fooled.”

Jeebleh was thoroughly confused. He took a mouthful of potatoes and helped himself to a generous cut of rubbery steak, which he eventually swallowed.

“What is he, then, if he’s not a driver?”

“He was once a top civilian aide to the Dictator,” the manager said. “Now he is second man to an armed militia that enjoys the backing of Ethiopia. You want my advice: Don’t be deceived!”

Jeebleh wasn’t sure how to react to the information. He stared at Ali in the hope that he might continue with this line of advice. No one likes to be taken for an easy ride. Was he being fed falsehoods? A driver who was not a driver! Once a diplomat in the Somali chancellery in Rome; then a top aide to the Dictator; now a driver. Where was the truth in all this? Then there was Af-Laawe, otherwise known as Marabou, who presented himself as a friend of Bile’s but at the same time badmouthed him. Someone had sent him to the airport to meet his flight, but Jeebleh was damned if he knew who.

“How did you come to meet your ‘driver’?” Ali asked.

“Af-Laawe arranged a lift for me with him.”

“A night has two faces,” the manager commented.

“What does that mean?”

“Simply that a night has a face that’s visible in the light,” the manager said, “and a face that’s ensconced in the mystery of the unexplored.”

Jeebleh could see that the manager was enjoying himself, probably repeating something he had rehearsed previously in front of other clients like him. In repose, the manager’s taut face put him in mind of a tree cut before its time. Although he couldn’t wipe the agitation off his own face, Jeebleh remained silent; he would have to find out if there was a profitable purpose to the lies.

The manager sat in an unkempt huddle, his arms folded across his heaving chest. “Don’t be deceived!” he repeated.

Jeebleh pushed away the inedible food, wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, and asked if there was a way to make a telephone call to America. The manager informed him, to his surprise, that this was possible. And when Jeebleh asserted that he hadn’t seen a phone in his room, the manager said, “There’s a one-man telephone company I can send for.”

“A what?”

“A one-man telephone company!”

Jeebleh remembered that until the late eighties it had been impossible to call Somalia from anywhere because the country boasted the worst telephone network on the entire continent. You just couldn’t get through to anyone living here. So how it was possible in civil war Mogadiscio for a one-man telephone company to allow him speak to his wife?

“It will cost you four dollars a minute. Shall I send for him?” the manager asked.

“Yes, please!”

HALF AN HOUR LATER, A MAN CAME TO JEEBLEH’S ROOM WITH A BRIEFCASE full of gadgets, including a telephone linked to a satellite long-distance service. Jeebleh called his wife at work, and gave her a sanitized version of what had happened so far. Lest she beg him to return at once, he omitted any mention of death or tensions. As far as he could remember, this was the first time that he had deliberately kept things from his wife.

And he realized, when he was once again alone in his room, that he wouldn’t hesitate to lie if he believed that by doing so he might serve a higher purpose: that of justice.

5

BILE SAT UP, STARTLED, CALLING OUT JEEBLEH’S NAME, HIS VOICE HOARSE and his thinking addled. He was shaking all over, shivering fitfully one instant, perspiring heavily the next.

In a dream, a young woman in search of a physician had come for him, to tell him about a neighbor’s horse that had broken loose and, in the process of bolting blindly, trampled her elderly husband underfoot, wounding him badly. Hysterical, the woman had appealed to Bile to help her. And she kept repeating her plea, “Save me from becoming a widow. Have pity on me and my unborn child. You must save him from becoming an orphan.” She repeated the same sentences again and again, until the words merged one into another and he couldn’t separate them.

Bile sat up in the darkness of his nightmare, disturbed that he was unsure whether he had ever met the young woman, or known of her. In his discomfiture, he couldn’t resolve whether the dream had called on him for a reason as yet unclear, whether it had any bearing on his life or the lives of those who mattered to him.

THE NIGHT SOFTENED INTO DAWN, AND STILL RESTLESS, BILE GOT UP TO MAKE a pot of coffee the way he liked it: black, strong, no sugar. In his pajamas and dressing gown, and still a little shaken, he moved around in the apartment in which he had lived alone for a week now, half listening for the kettle to call when the water had boiled. He felt a chill of fluster in his bones, and a deep fear surged in him. Jeebleh, his friend, who was in Mogadiscio now, and Seamus, a close Irish friend, who was away in Europe, were of the view that he was in the habit of going into silent depressions, avoiding confrontations, or putting things off. He had never grieved enough, or been able to work through his rage at Caloosha for all the damage his half brother had done to him. Bile would retort that if he hadn’t acted on the deep-felt hurt, it was because he was a man of peace.

He returned to the kitchen in jitters, his hands trembling as he picked up the singing kettle. He poured the boiled water into the pot and, missing his target by a few inches, emptied much of the water on the flames, thus extinguishing the fire. He became even more agitated thinking about what Jeebleh might ask when he saw him. He was likely to ask whether Bile had done anything about Caloosha, and if so, precisely what. If Bile’s reply was in the negative, his friend was bound to say, “But what’s wrong with you?”

Wrapped in a fever of shivers, Bile took the coffee tray with him into his study and sat in a swivel chair by the window, whose curtains were open. He placed the tray precariously on the side of the crowded desk, because there were far too many books on the coffee table. There were books everywhere, on the desk, on the floor by his favorite rocking chair, on the windowsill, many of them open, some with bookmarks, others lying facedown. One book was splayed on its side, as though it had been knocked over recently. Bile knew the man who had written it, a fellow doctor famous more for his silly infatuation with the politics of his clansman StrongmanSouth than for his professionalism. Bile stared at a spot in the distant heavens, in the manner of someone abruptly stripped of memories, and balked at his own reaction to Jeebleh’s unexpected arrival.

When he heard the muezzin calling all Muslims to their dawn prayer, he pushed his enraged emotions aside and got up, intending to find a prayer rug for the first time in many years. He had no idea why, but a few minutes later he was standing before the blackboard on the wall, a piece of chalk in his hand, adding “Clean towels, sheets for Jeebleh’s bed, etc.” to the day’s to-do list. No sooner had he replaced the chalk and dusted his hands clean than he was appalled that he hadn’t said his prayers — and on top of this he was dismayed at reading what he had just written, for he had assigned Raasta’s room to Jeebleh without giving the matter any serious thought. He leaned against the wall, worried that he might sink into a delirium. With the sun’s early rays falling on his face, he might have been a rabbit caught in a mighty floodlight, its warren of possible escapes blocked off. When he went into the bathroom, he felt as closed in as a rabbit seeing its frightened expression in a mirror. Studying his reflection, he felt that he was staring at someone else’s face, remembering and reliving someone else’s history, listening to the thought processes of someone alien to him.

Bile was fifty-eight, tall, with a back straight as a ramrod. There wasn’t a single ounce of extra fat on his body. His mud-brown eyes were restless, and his lips were forever astir, in the active manner of a mystic endlessly reciting his devotions. His hair was cut short, in the style of a get-up-and-go man who hasn’t the time to comb it. He typically wore either jeans or trousers that didn’t need to be ironed.

Shaving, he cut his chin, and his forefinger came into contact with a trickle of blood. He dabbed the cut with toilet paper, and grew steadily calmer, until he remembered who and where he was. He dabbed the cut again, to see how much blood he was losing.

In these unsettling times, everyone’s fate, actions, dreams, hates, and aspirations were seen, understood, and interpreted in stark political contexts; distrust was the order of the day, and everyone was suspicious of everybody else. If Jeebleh were to express dissatisfaction with Bile’s way of doing things, Bile would contrast it to his friend’s lex talionis, affirming that he, Bile, did not feel indentured to an Old Testament law of retaliation. There was no doubt in his mind that the dark side of wrong would not be allowed to triumph. Now this: Raasta kidnapped; her father, Faahiye, missing. Rumor had it that Faahiye had last been seen heading for a refugee camp in Mombasa.

Bile’s fears and sense of despair came close to depression, as he thought of a western he had seen once in which the good characters were caught in deadly quarrels among themselves, while the bad, who posed a greater threat to the fabric of society, were all dealt winning hands in the first part of the film. He knew from personal experience how often people, like Faahiye and his wife, Shanta, eager to change the unreconstructed ways of Somali society, fought fiercely among themselves until they had no energy left to take on the reactionaries who ran the real show. In a civil war, there were no progressives and no reactionaries; everyone was a victim, seldom a culprit.

His knees and hip joints stiffening, he recalled how, with the prison gates left open after the Tyrant fled the city, he had taken his first step into what he assumed was freedom. For almost an hour, he had watched with detached amusement as other prisoners ran from their cells as fast as their feet could carry them. A few of his fellow political detainees, whom he hadn’t seen for years because he was kept isolated, came by his cell on their way out. He remembered saying to one of them, “What’s the hurry?” But why, why didn’t he flee?

The truth was shockingly mundane. He was merely having difficulty getting to his feet, suffering, as he was, from locomotor ataxia, in which the lower limbs are numbed. Try as he might, he would rise and then fall, again and again, his feet and legs failing him, his heels hurting, his eyes in pain when he opened or closed them, his head dizzy. As a political detainee, in isolation for seventeen years, Bile had been denied his right to take fresh air, to walk about in the prison yard, or to come into even indirect contact with the world outside. He had received no letters and no books.

Kept in a tiny cubicle, where it was impossible for a tall man like him to stand to his full height, he did what he could to remain fit, exercising within the limited space. But things were made even less tolerable, physically and mentally, when a month before the collapse of the state, more draconian security measures designed to confound the prisoners were introduced. He was kept in a dark room, allowed no contact with anyone, including the wardens. Then he was taken out of isolation and made to share a cubicle with petty thieves and other riffraff. Bile couldn’t say whether he preferred total isolation in a dark cubicle to confinement in the same cramped space with lowminded thugs, who wouldn’t let him be.

He remembered how at long last he had risen later that afternoon of liberation, only to find that his knees had stiffened, and his hip joints were as tight as rigor mortis. Nonetheless, he took a healthy long step with the stronger leg, swung the rest of his unwilling body around, and carried himself out of prison. It was that first, willing step that eventually brought him to Raasta, his niece.

And what a girl!

Now showered, shaved, and restless, Bile went to Raasta’s room, where he found himself reliving a most pleasant memory: the day she was born. The image that stood out was one of a wet thing in his embrace, curled up, fists tight, as if she held the entire cosmos in her clasp. Asleep, she might have been a kitten delighting in the sound of its own purr. She was exceptionally beautiful, eyes the shape of almonds, mulberry-colored lips forever parted.

When she was born, there were four of them in the room: Shanta, her mother, half dead from exhaustion; Faahiye, her father; the midwife; and him. Faahiye, who was prone to going off in a dark rage, reminded Bile of a bird with its wings stuck in the mud it had wallowed in, clumsily trying to fly.

The girl was a few days old when it was discovered that she drew people to herself. They came by the hundreds whenever there was fighting, which was most of the time. People fleeing turned up at the house with the big compound, where they all stayed for the first few months of the civil war. They felt safe in her vicinity. Word went around that she was “protected,” and so were those who found themselves near her. As a result, more escapees in search of safety from the fighting arrived to camp in the compound. At the time, there was no telling whether Faahiye was exaggerating when he claimed that “peace of mind will descend, halo-like, on whoever holds the girl in his or her embrace.” Bile bore witness to the fact that Raasta, whose birth name was Rajo, meaning “hope,” was always calm. She was rarely given to crying, even when she wet herself, as other babies of her age did. Nor did she cry when she was hungry. She was a miracle child, gaining everyone’s trust, serving as a conduit for peace, enabling any two people at odds with each other to talk and make up. Nothing troubled her more than words of disregard hurled by people at each other in front of her. In her presence, her parents, to their credit, tolerated each other, in contrast to their mighty quarrels when she wasn’t around.

She was equally popular with children and adults, and had a way of attracting virtual strangers, who willingly fed from the open palm of her charm. Occasionally she displayed a sense of discomfort in the company of immediate members of her family, who knew no self-restraint and were in the habit of losing their tempers.

Raasta shared a spiritual closeness with Bile, whom she treated like a surrogate parent.

She was never bored; she seldom seemed lonely, even when alone. She jabbered, improvising stories with which she entertained herself. It was clear that other people were in need of her, not she of them. And she always had an entourage of children in tow. Some came from poor backgrounds and were in rags, the younger ones with wet noses and eyes crawling with famished flies; still others brought along kwashiorkor bellies, drop foot, rickets, and other complaints. At the age of three, Raasta had gone about The Refuge with pocketfuls of vitamins that she distributed to the other children, earning herself the nickname Dr. Dreadlock, bestowed on her by the Africa director of UNICEF, who was on a fact-finding mission after the U.S. withdrawal. Even earlier, her intelligence knew no bounds. Bile remembered how she learned languages as soon as she heard the first fricative consonant of the new tongue, or was asked to repeat the guttural in place of the vowel sound of a monosyllabic derivative. By the time she was three, she could speak, read, and write three languages. At five and a half, her mastery of a few more tongues was exemplary.

Bile had thought he could get used to anything, because he had survived years of detention and many more of humiliation at the cruel hands of his half brother. Getting accustomed to Raasta’s absence, though, was proving impossible. She had been the only constant in his life since he regained his freedom. He might have achieved as much as he had without her help, or done whatever he had done without her input. But he most certainly would not have cherished life as the sweet thing it had become if it had not been for her. She had taught him what it meant to be happy.

At times, he believed that his most dear darling had gone simply because she was fed up with the way her parents quarreled; at other times, he believed she had been kidnapped.

TEARS OF SORROW WET BILE’S FACE AS HE RELIVED THE LAST EVENING HE had spent with his niece. It had been early evening, when, tucked in bed, comfortable, and ready to sleep, he had told a folktale to Raasta and her playmate Makka. As had been his custom, he had lain between them, each girl with her head on his shoulder, to listen attentively to a tale about two giants.

Once there were two giants. One of them was a cruel tyrant, the other a wise king. The two giants did not know of each other’s existence, they had never met — even though their kingdoms were next to each other. The cruel giant was called Uurku-Baalle, “the one who has wings in his belly,” a name that meant that he knew everything about people just by looking at them; he knew when they were lying, and when they were telling the truth. The good giant was Shimbiriile, and he lived in a cave. His nickname was Dirir, the bad giant’s Xabbad.

The cruel king Xabbad enjoyed making people cry; he liked to see terror on the faces of his victims, and he was happy when they were sad. He delighted in satisfying every desire of his, and never hesitated to take things that didn’t belong to him. He was a hoarder, and claimed that all things belonged to him. Almost every house, every farm, and all money were in his name, in that of his immediate family, or in the names of those who were most loyal to his evil doings. He knew the details and movements of his people. To appease him, his subjects paid him large tributes. The more he was given, the greedier he became. Many of his subjects fled because they were fed up. They moved out of his kingdom to others, where they felt safer and were allowed to keep the things that belonged to them.

One day a distant relative of the kind king Dirir’s by marriage played host to a family seeking refuge from Xabbad’s kingdom, and Dirir came to hear of the terrible things that had been done to them. He heard more stories, as more people fleeing the bad giant’s territory came to live in his peaceful realm. The more horrific their tales, the keener he became to help the weak and the innocent. He gathered his advisors and a select few of the newcomers, and they talked and talked the whole day. Then the good king said, “We must help these people, we must put an end to these cruelties.”

His people gave their full support, the able-bodied men volunteering to fight, and the rich offering to help feed the army when it was at war. Dirir prepared for war. He put on his custom-made steel bangles, which served as ornaments but could be used as powerful weapons. The bangles were heavy, and so strong they could shatter even the toughest iron shield. When word reached Xabbad that Dirir and his men were ready to attack, many more of his subjects changed sides and fled his territory. They liked what Dirir was doing.

At long last, Dirir and Xabbad came face to face. And Dirir threw a daandaansi gauntlet in the wicked ruler’s direction, insisting that he remove the boulders that he and his men had put in the way of nomads who wanted to water their beasts from the wells.

“And if I refuse, what will you do?” came the bad giant’s fierce challenge.

“Then you leave me no choice but to destroy you,” responded the good giant. “I cannot stand by and hear about you looting the camels belonging to others, killing many innocent people.”

BILE WAS DRESSED, BUT NOT READY TO FACE THE DAY. HE SAT AT HIS DESK, which was pushed into a corner. Close to his right hand were three telephones, each linked to one of the city’s networks. There was a fax machine, and two mobile phones.

He thought back to a conversation he had had years before with Seamus and Jeebleh. For some three years, they had lived together in an apartment in Padua, in Italy. He couldn’t remember which of them had described their friendship as “a country — spacious, giving, and generous.” They held no secrets from one another, and lived out of one another’s pockets, sharing all.

At the time, Jeebleh was doing his dissertation on Dante’s Inferno, casting the epic into a poetic idiom comprehensible to a Somali; Bile was studying medicine; and Seamus was working on a postgraduate degree in Italian. Who would’ve thought that the three of them had discussed even then what Somalia would be like if the country plunged into anarchy? Reflecting on the Inferno made Bile shift to the recent past, and a conversation from a week before, when he had taken Seamus to the airport. They were, perhaps unsurprisingly, discussing hell.

Seamus was arguing that hell was a state of mind, not a place with its own territoriality, where the perpetrators of evil were condemned to serve an afterlife of punishments. Bile had reminded his Irish friend that in the Koran, the word for “hell” was specifically derived from “fire.” And he had quoted the Prophet, who, when asked to qualify the relationship between “hell” and “fire,” explained that the former was “more than the fires of the world by sixty-nine parts, every part of which is equal to all the fires of the world!” A sinner experiencing hell would feel as though he were wearing shoes or thongs made of fire, as though the brain in his head were melting. “It’s like being thrown into a boiling copper furnace!” Bile said. Not quite sure of his facts, Seamus wondered whether the Arabic word for “hell” was not based on the Jewish concept Gehenna. To which Bile responded that, according to the Koran, Gehenna “is the purgatorial hell through whose gates all Muslims pass.”

Seamus countered with an Irish fable. A blacksmith deep in debt sells his soul to Satan in exchange for wealth. There is one proviso, however: he’ll lose everything and die if he doesn’t repay the loan in seven years. When the allotted time is up, Satan presents himself before the blacksmith to remind him of their contract. The blacksmith pleads for an extension, which is granted. At the end of this period, he pleads for more time, and again his request is granted. But when he asks for a third extension, Satan will not oblige. He takes possession of the man’s soul. And the blacksmith dies.

The dead blacksmith comes to the gates of heaven, where he meets Saint Peter, who reminds him that because he has sold his soul to the devil in exchange for wealth, he is not welcome. With no other choice, the blacksmith goes to the gates of hell. There, the devil gleefully informs the unhappy fellow that he is not welcome in hell either. When he learns that no amount of pleading will help, he asks Satan, “But where am I to go, then? Where can someone like me go, a man with no soul, no wealth, no power, and no friends to intercede on his behalf?”

“Make your own hell!” Satan tells him.

And so, Seamus concluded, “hell is a warlord who’s ransomed his soul to Satan, in exchange for elusive power.” Then he got on a plane bound for Dublin, leaving Bile alone in Mogadiscio.

THREE OF THE TELEPHONES ON BILE’S DESK STARTED RINGING SIMULTANEOUSLY, though not in any coordinated manner, because the phone companies were owned by subsidiaries of companies based in the United States, Norway, and Malaysia, and the tones they used were different. He didn’t like to answer telephones at random. Then all three phones stopped ringing, only for one to resume after a brief pause. Bile picked it up, because he knew from the code that Dajaal, his man Friday, would be at the other end of the line.

Dajaal asked, “Is there any errand you would like me to run before I see you in half an hour?”

“Yes,” said Bile. “I’d like you to pick up my friend Jeebleh from his hotel, and to bring him here. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you came here first, so I can give you a note for him, just in case you don’t find him there. I want him to know that I’d like to see him right away.”

Dajaal asked, “Do I go armed or unarmed?”

Bile did not answer immediately, because one of the phones had resumed ringing. Then he reminded himself that this was the first time Dajaal had put such a question to him, though he had offered to serve as Bile’s hit man, when word circulated that men allied to an illicit group with links to Mogadiscio’s underworld had kidnapped Raasta. Dajaal knew what was what, but Bile was a man of peace; he would not countenance such a heinous thought. Carrying a firearm was contrary to everything Bile held dear, anathema to his professional ethics as a doctor. “I would prefer for you to go unarmed. And in any case, I would like you to bring my friend Jeebleh here unharmed!”

He hung up, and let the other phone ring and ring and ring. He enjoyed an inner calm, as he thought about meeting Jeebleh, hugging and welcoming him warmly.

6

JEEBLEH SLEPT A TROUBLED SLEEP.

He dreamt of taking part in fierce clan fighting. He was serving as an auxiliary to Caloosha, who, as commander, saw to the deadly operation. Caloosha was at the wheel of the battlewagon. Trained as an attack animal, Jeebleh took pure delight in the killing spree: happy to be on such a savage mission, in which no prisoners were taken, and in which women were first disemboweled and emptied of their babies, then raped.

A rocket from a bazooka flew over their heads, hitting no one; then heavy machine guns went wild. A missile struck the battlewagon, severing it into two uneven halves. Caloosha and Jeebleh remained in the front of the battlewagon and drove off, separated from the fighters.

The two were in a jubilant mood, singing praises in honor of their common ancestor. Jeebleh wore a belt of bullets, and held a recently fired assault rifle close to his chest, hugging it as one might hug a baby. His fingers came into contact with the bloodied bayonet, as though testing its sharpness. It felt as dull as a dead tooth.

UPON WAKING, JEEBLEH WAS CONSCIOUS OF SHUFFLING MOVEMENTS, SOURCE unknown. He was bothered that he couldn’t tell whether he was still in the Faustian country of his nightmare, a recruit fighting savagely to prove his worth to the clan family, or whether he was awake and hearing living sounds, of which he would eventually make sense.

It took him a long time to identify the source of the noise: a chameleon that was making its way along the floor of his room. What business did a chameleon have with him, up in his room on the second floor? Chameleons had terrified him as a child. Had someone who knew that brought it and deposited it on his balcony, while he was sleeping? Jeebleh doubted that the reptile could have covered such a distance by itself. So who was playing a prank on him, and for what purpose?

In an instant of utter insanity bodied forth by an odd mix of fear and superstition, he got down on the floor and, supporting himself on his elbow, eyeballed his saurian visitor. He watched the reptile’s effete efforts as it headed for him, its one-step-forward, half-a-step-back movement holding Jeebleh under its spell. He sensed an inner tremor as he recalled the atavistic fears Africans had for chameleons, which were believed to have carried the message of death from the heavens. A number of African myths centered death on two oral messages, the one given to a hare and guaranteeing uninterrupted life, the other to a chameleon and presaging mortality. In the myths, the chameleon delivered the message, in obedience to an ancient dark fear. The hare, however, was distracted by its playfulness and failed to pass on the message of life.

Jeebleh took the measure of his own phobia as the reptile moved its eyes in constant gyration — first clockwise, then counterclockwise. It was probably making its presence felt, like an elephant employing theatrics to instill fear in its opponents. The eyes did not seem an ordinary part of its body, because they hung in front of its face, like two monocles, and rolled like dice dipped in Benetton colors. Its tail now curled up, its tongue out, it appeared, to Jeebleh, longer, its body grossly distended and intimidating.

But once he ceased to perspire so profusely, Jeebleh started to draw courage from the supposition that death is a direction rather than the end in the process of a life, and that the reptile is a mythical representation of an abstraction. After all, while the hare kept changing direction, the chameleon did not.

Now, for some reason, it was the reptile that was changing its course and moving toward the balcony, with the pained motion of an amputee on wobbly crutches making a U-turn. Leaving, the chameleon became a mere reptile, having no magical properties whatsoever.

And then there was a knock on the door.

A YOUTH WITH A MUDDY EXPRESSION, LIKE A FROG WITH DRIED CLAY STICKING to its forehead, was on the doorstep. Loath to allow him in, lest he should see the chameleon departing, Jeebleh held the door in a tight grip. “Yes?”

“What would you like for breakfast?”

Jeebleh couldn’t imagine eating a breakfast that had been handled by such a youth. “Nothing for me, only coffee,” he said. “Please.”

“No cooked breakfast?”

“Only coffee.”

“What kind?”

“What’s available?”

“Coffee in Yemeni style, or instant.”

With his skin prickling, and fearful that he might break into a sweat of itches at the thought of spending more time with the youth, he said, “Yemeni style, please.”

“No eggs, no bread, nothing else?” the youth urged.

“None.”

But the boy didn’t seem ready to leave. He stood there, ogling Jeebleh, who couldn’t bring himself to shut the door in his face. The soft morning sunlight separated him where he stood, with his hair on end, from the youth. He studied the teenager from close quarters, and decided that his face was much older than the rest of his body, what with the desert cracks in his dry, neglected skin. He couldn’t help thinking of the degraded state of the soil of the Sahel, with its proximity to the Sahara. The youth’s eyes were the size of black ants, his teeth appeared more rotten now that the gentle sun fell on them, and they had the hue of ginger taken from a curry pot. Hunger had gnawed at his cheeks too. Years of dictatorship, the habit of chewing qaat, and the civil war together had brought the boy’s potential and his overall health to a sad, retarded state.

“And you’ll like your coffee before you go?”

It was news to Jeebleh that he was going anywhere. At least, he couldn’t remember arranging to go anywhere, unless he had clean forgotten. “Where am I supposed to be going?”

“I was told you were going somewhere.”

“Who told you that?”

“I don’t know.”

Jeebleh’s breath caught in his throat. He dreaded things coming to this: appointments being arranged for him when he had no idea where or with whom. Did he have any choice but to honor the request for him to go somewhere, on someone’s whim? Had he no choice in what he did, where he went and when? He was about to goad the youth into giving him the source of his information, when another youth arrived bearing two pails, presumably containing hot water and cold. The two boys greeted each other amiably, and the breakfast boy went down a couple of steps to help carry one of the pails. When they came to within half a meter of him, Jeebleh noticed something quite odd about the bath boy’s features. He was missing a nostril. Maybe an untended bullet wound had turned gangrenous, damaging his face. Jeebleh indicated that they should give him the pails and he would take them in. They did as they were told, and left, holding hands and laughing luridly.

Showered and dressed casually, Jeebleh picked up the two pails, which he meant to leave in the corridor, and was ready to pull the door open and bounce youthfully downstairs, when he heard another knock on the door. This time it was one of the bellboys to say that he had a visitor.

JEEBLEH DESCENDED THE STAIRS SLOWLY, OVERWHELMED WITH FOREBODING. In his distracted state, he almost collided with a young woman going up with a pail and a mop. He regained his balance just in time, and continued down the steps, past the reception area, where several youths lounged, and out to the courtyard, awash with bright sunlight.

Af-Laawe was there to surprise him, greeting him as one Arab greets another, with the left hand on the heart, head slightly bowed, right hand touching lips moving and emitting a salvo of blessings. Af-Laawe ended his theatrics with a sweeping gesture of his right hand, half prostrating himself. Then he spoke in an ellipsis: “A nightmare of loyalties!”

Jeebleh refused to be taken in by anyone’s antics, least of all Af-Laawe’s. With a straight face, he replied, “Would you like to join me for coffee?”

“Yes, I would.”

They sat outdoors at a plastic table with three chairs around it. The breakfast boy brought Jeebleh his Yemeni coffee in an aluminum pot, which proved difficult to hold or pour; but he managed it, then pushed the sugar bowl toward Af-Laawe, who helped himself generously.

“How was your first night back?” Af-Laawe asked.

“Thank you for arranging the lift and the hotel.”

“I hope the manager is treating you well.”

“He is, considering the circumstances.”

“The room is all right?”

“I can’t ask for more,” Jeebleh said.

And then all that the driver had said about Af-Laawe returned to Jeebleh in a flash. His lips were touched with a knowing grin, in anticipation of learning more about Af-Laawe’s link to Caloosha’s world of deceits, conspiracies, and killings. Jeebleh replaced the features of the driver with an identikit that might have been a cross between Af-Laawe and Caloosha; he superimposed this on the face of a hardened criminal wanted for a series of robberies worth millions of dollars.

“I’m glad you’re having a good time,” Af-Laawe said.

All around the courtyard, Jeebleh noticed vultures gathering. They arrived soundlessly, working to a precise timetable, one every half-minute, like airplanes landing. There were no fewer than a dozen, the largest the size of a Fiat Cinquecento, heads down, wings folded, beaks held dramatically in mid-motion. One particular bird disappeared every now and again, only to reappear a few minutes later as several more birds joined the gathering. Jeebleh found it strange to see vultures alighting in the courtyard of a four-star hotel. Where was the carrion to be had?

He fell under the spell of the spectacle. He couldn’t take his eyes off the vultures, now dividing themselves into two groups, on what basis he couldn’t tell. The huge vulture went back and forth between the groups, then took off quietly, and was gone for a good while. He returned with a companion of similar size and comparable build, but with a beak of a different color. The two birds went back and forth between the two groups as if ferrying urgent messages.

“Vultures, crows, and marabous have been our constant companions these past few years,” Af-Laawe said. “There’ve been so many corpses abandoned, unburied. You will see that crows are no longer afraid if you try to shoo them away. At the height of the four-month war between the militiamen of StrongmanSouth and StrongmanNorth, the crows and the vultures were so used to being on the ground foraging, they were like tourist pigeons in a Florentine piazza. These scavengers have been well served by the civil war.”

“Why the nickname ‘Marabou’?” Jeebleh asked.

“Somebody has been telling you things.”

“And why ‘Funeral with a Difference’?”

Af-Laawe said, “I started the funeral service when sorrow felt like something emitting a bad odor that was forever there, as though it had been smeared on the inside of my nostrils. After the mosques were raided and the women seeking refuge in God’s house taken out and raped, I set up an NGO to take care of the dead.”

“Where did you get the funds to set it up?”

“I raised them myself,” he said.

Was Af-Laawe, as he told it, a lone do-gooder in the style of the folk heroes one read about as a child? Jeebleh wondered what good a single person could do in a place where the bad outnumbered the virtuous. Maybe one must do what one can, the best one can.

Af-Laawe continued, “At least I am in the privileged position of choosing what I want to do and how I go about it. Not everyone is in this position.”

Who was he, really — a troubleshooter on a fat salary from the EU; a bigtime swindler, with a heist stashed away in a Swiss bank; a do-gooder with an NGO to bury the unclaimed dead; a house-sitter looking after the property of a family who had fled?

“Speaking of choices,” Jeebleh said, after a long silence, “did the members of the clan families who fled the city choose to flee, or were they forced to abandon their properties in a city they adored?”

“These are abnormal times!”

“I can see that,” Jeebleh said, and looked at the vultures holding a conference a few meters from where they were seated.

The traces of a wicked grin formed around Af-Laawe’s drawn-in lips. He noticed Jeebleh’s gaze. “A cynic I know says that thanks to the vultures, the marabous, and the hawks, we have no fear of diseases spreading,” he said. “They clean things up, don’t they? My cynical friend suggests that when the country is reconstituted as a functioning state, we should have a vulture as our national symbol.”

“You wouldn’t be that cynic yourself?” Jeebleh asked.

Af-Laawe stonewalled again: “These are abnormal times.”

“I would agree it’s abnormal to see scavengers of carrion at a four-star hotel, looking as though they are well placed to choose what they eat and where they go. They look better fed than humans.”

It puzzled Jeebleh to see that Af-Laawe was upset. Had he said something to offend him? Now his drawn-in lips moved, like a baby fish feeding.

“There were far more vultures and marabous in the aftermath of the October-third debacle, when over a thousand supporters of StrongmanSouth were massacred, and eighteen U.S. soldiers lost their lives. I bore witness to the arrival of these scavengers, gathered around the battle zone, and perched on the lookout points in the neighborhood.”

The words were spoken like an attack. Did Af-Laawe think that Jeebleh, as an American, would be upset if he mentioned the U.S. dead in Mogadiscio in the same breath as sighting scavengers gathering at the battle zone? Because Jeebleh assumed that Af-Laawe’s badness was emerging, he prepared for an attack, and waited. He was getting to know Af-Laawe a little better at least.

Af-Laawe went on, still in attack mode. “On the fourth of October, there were as many carrion-eaters as there were human beings come to witness the massacre. But the birds had no chance to get at the corpses of the Somali dead, since these were taken away and buried by their families. A discerning person, like my cynical friend, would’ve seen two marabou storks, weighing no less than twenty kilograms each, discreetly following the progress of the riotous mob dragging the corpse of an American Ranger down the dusty alleyways of the city. The marabous followed the mob, and my friend tells me that their bare heads and bare necks were in clear view. Maybe they expected the crowd to abandon the corpse of the American at some point, so they might pounce on it. The hawks hung back, remaining at a distance. They didn’t want to get into direct conflict with the marabous.”

Jeebleh, listening to Af-Laawe, realized that he himself was infested with more venom toward Caloosha and anyone associated with him than he had thought possible, despite his years of exile.

“Do you wish to know the name of the cynic I was with?” Af-Laawe said. When Jeebleh nodded, he asked, “Have you ever met Faahiye?”

“I know Raasta’s father,” Jeebleh said.

“He’s the cynic I was with on the fourth of October.”

Jeebleh was relieved that they had changed the subject when they did, even though he doubted very much that Faahiye had said any of the terrible things ascribed to him. “Where is Faahiye?” he asked.

“A cynic, who’s angry at the world,” Af-Laawe said.

“No stonewalling. Where is he?”

“Faahiye hates being an appendage.”

“An appendage of whom?”

“Faahiye looks forward to the day when he is his own man, not an appendage,” Af-Laawe explained, “not to be referred to as Raasta’s father, or as Bile’s brother-in-law.”

“Where is he?”

“He was headed for a refugee camp on the outskirts of Mombasa when I last heard about him,” Af-Laawe said. “They say he was thin, as we all are, and the worse for wear, as we all are.” After a pause he added, “He was troubled like a rutting he-dog, not knowing what to do, where to turn, because he is terribly excited.” Pleased with his private joke, Af-Laawe graced his lips with a grin. Jeebleh waited, expecting Af-Laawe’s exculpatory defense of his own behavior, after he had been accused of such insensitivity, but Af-Laawe did no such thing.

Now, why did the story about the marabou storks following the progress of the American Ranger disturb Jeebleh so? Before he had time to answer, a bellboy called him to the telephone. He asked who it was who wanted him on the phone, expecting it to be Bile. The boy said, “The name sounds like Baaja — I don’t know.”

Af-Laawe stepped in helpfully. “He means Dajaal.”

“Who’s Dajaal?”

“Bile’s man Friday.”

Jeebleh got to his feet, hurting and clumsy, and nearly toppled the plastic table. “Sorry!” he said, with guilt on his face, and he rushed off, passing the gathering of the carrion birds, their presence of no apparent concern to him.

On the phone, Dajaal said he would come shortly to take him to Bile.

7

THE ROADS MOVED: NOW FAST, NOW SLOW.

From where he sat in the back of the car, Jeebleh saw vultures everywhere he turned: in the sky and among the clouds, in the trees, of which there were many, and on top of buildings. There were a host of other carrion-feeders too, marabous, and a handful of crows. Death was on his mind, subtly and perilously courting his interest, tempting him.

He remembered with renewed shock how he and Af-Laawe had come to their falling-out earlier. Perhaps he wasn’t as exempt as he had believed from the contagion that was of a piece with civil wars as he had believed; perhaps he was beginning to catch the madness from the food he had eaten, the water he had drunk, the company he had kept. He doubted that he would knowingly take an active part in the commission of a crime, even if he were open to being convinced that society would benefit from ridding itself of vermin. He knew he was capable of pulling the trigger if it came to that. His hand went to his shirt pocket, where he had his cash and his U.S. passport. He meant to leave these in Bile’s apartment, where they would be safer than in his toiletry bag.

Dajaal was in front beside the driver, and Jeebleh had the back to himself. The ride was bumpy, because of the deep ruts in the road. In fact there wasn’t much of a road to speak of, and the car slowed every now and then, at times stopping altogether, as the driver avoided dropping into potholes as deep as trenches.

Looking at Bile’s man Friday, Jeebleh thought that Dajaal must once have been a high-ranking officer in the National Army. He deduced this from his military posture, from the care with which he spoke, and from his general demeanor. He suspected that Dajaal was armed: one of his hands was out of sight, hidden, and the other stayed close to the glove compartment, as though meaning to spring it open in the event of need. Getting into the vehicle, Jeebleh had seen a machine gun lying casually on the floor, looking as innocuous as a child’s toy gun. The butt of the gun rested on Dajaal’s bare right foot — maybe to make it easier to kick up into the air, catch with his hands, aim, and shoot. You’re dead, militiaman!

What Jeebleh had seen of the city so far marked it as a place of sorrow. Many houses had no roofs, and bullets scarred nearly every wall. In contrast to the rundown ghetto of an American city, where the windows might be boarded up, here the window frames were simply empty. The streets were eerily, ominously quiet. They saw no pedestrians on the roads, and met no other vehicles. Jeebleh felt a tremor, imagining that the residents had been slaughtered “in one another’s blood,” as Virgil had it. He would like to know whether, in this civil war, both those violated and the violators suffered from a huge deficiency — the inability to remain in touch with their inner selves or to remember who they were before the slaughter began. Could this be the case in Rwanda or Liberia? Not that one could make sense of this war on an intellectual level — only on an emotional level. Here, self-preservation helped one to understand.

“Why is ours the only car on the road?” Jeebleh asked.

“We’re headed south, maybe that’s why,” Dajaal replied.

“The roads were crowded on your way north?”

“We’re taking a different route from the one we took coming.”

“Why?”

“It’s the thing most drivers do.” Dajaal waited for the driver to confirm what he had said with a nod. Then he continued, “They believe that taking a different route from the one they used earlier will minimize the chance of driving into an ambush.”

“This is a much longer route, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

The driver, in a whispered aside, commented to Dajaal that he thought Jeebleh had arrived in the country only a day earlier.

Jeebleh’s eyes fell on a bullet-scarred, mortar-struck, machine-gunshowered three-story building leaning every which way, as if in homage to the towering idea of a Pisa. He was surprised that it didn’t cave in as they drove past — and relieved, for there were people moving about in the upper story, minding their business.

He asked Dajaal, “Have you participated in any of the fighting?”

“I’ve never been a member of a clan-based militia.”

“So what fighting did you take part in?”

“Let’s say that I got dragged into one when the American in charge of the United Nations operation ordered his forces to attack a house where I was attending a meeting.”

“The American-in-charge.” Jeebleh strung the words together, at first hyphenating them in his mind, to capture Dajaal’s enunciation, then abbreviating them: AIC. Jeebleh had heard that that was how he was known in certain circles.

“This was the first American attack on StrongmanSouth, in July 1993,” Dajaal went on. “I was at a gathering of my clan family’s intellectuals, military leaders, traditional elders, and other opinion makers. It was our aim to find a peaceful way out of the impasse between the American in charge of the UN Blue Helmets, and StrongmanSouth and his militiamen. The July gathering has since become famous, because it led eventually to the October-third slaughter. It was the viciousness of what occurred in July, when helicopters attacked our gathering, that decided me to dig up my weapons from where I had buried them after the Dictator fled the city.”

“I presume you know StrongmanSouth?”

“I served under him,” Dajaal replied. “He was my immediate commander, during the Ogaden War. We didn’t get on well for much of the time, which was why I declined to be his deputy when he set up the clan militia. I knew him well enough not to want to be near him if I could help it. The man is determined to become president, and he’ll use foul means or fair to get what he wants.”

The driver made a left turn, and as far as Jeebleh could tell, headed back the way they had come. He slowed down, as if to allow Dajaal time in which to gather his harried thoughts.

“I remember that Cobra and Black Hawk helicopters attacked us in the house where we were having our meeting,” Dajaal continued. “Once the attack began, it was so fierce I felt hell was paying us a visit. The skies fell on us, the earth shook down to its separate grains of sand.”

Jeebleh listened intently and remained still.

Dajaal went on: “I felt each explosion of the missiles, followed by an inferno of smoke so black I thought a total eclipse had descended on my mind. And the shrapnel, the spurting blood I saw, the men lying so still between one living moment and a dead instant, the moaning — I was unprepared for the shock. I remember thinking, ‘Here’s an apocalypse of the new order.’ It’s very worrying to see a man you’re talking to blown away to dust by laser-guided death, deceptive in its stealth. We all lost our sense of direction, like ants fleeing head-on into tongues of flame, and not knowing what killed them.”

Jeebleh dared not speak.

Dajaal’s voice had in it a good mix of rawness and rage. “Coming out the door of the house, I tripped on a pile of shoes. But I walked on, barefoot, shaking with fury, until I found myself in another compound, my eyes still smarting from the black smoke. You could say I came to only after the helicopters left. I knew then that I was still alive. But I couldn’t make sense of what had happened, even as the crowds gathered in front of the target villa. I learned that many of my friends had died, and that a number had been taken prisoner, in handcuffs, and treated as common criminals.

“It was a hell of a day.” Dajaal was close to tears, reliving the scene, and angry too. But Jeebleh couldn’t tell at whom. Dajaal resumed: “The cattle, terrorized, ran off mad, the donkeys brayed and brayed, and the hens didn’t lay eggs for several weeks. Our women noted a change in their monthly cycles, and their psyches were irreparably damaged. No time to mourn, our dead were buried the same day.”

“Provoked in July,” Jeebleh said. “So you dug up your gun and were ready for the October confrontation, determined to take vengeance?”

Dajaal’s expression, or what Jeebleh could see of it, was a touch sadder, as he nodded. Sorrow pervaded his voice. Jeebleh understood from what he had heard that badness had names and faces: those of StrongmanSouth, and of the AIC. And of course Caloosha and the Dictator too.

“Were you opposed to the Americans’ coming in the first place?”

“We welcomed their coming, we did,” Dajaal said.

“What happened then?”

“They were just crass, that is what happened.”

“Tell me more.”

Dajaal said, “My grandson Qasiir was among half a dozen unarmed boys at the international airport, then closed, doing what youths of his age do. They were fooling around, some smoking, others lounging or sleeping in abandoned vehicles. Then the Marines landed at the beach. And what was the first thing they did? They handcuffed my grandson and several others with belts, electrical cords, whatever else was handy. They humiliated them for no reason, intimidated them, and arrested them. The boys were doing no harm to anyone. Then July happened, and I was in it, as close to death as I’ve ever known, many of my clansmen killed or wounded, or carted off to some prison island off the coast. Then in October, my granddaughter, my son’s youngest, was blown away in a helicopter’s uprush of air and confusion.”

Jeebleh spoke in a whisper and with the caution of someone avoiding a mine. “You were never in support of StrongmanSouth yourself?”

“Hell no, I wasn’t.”

Again Jeebleh spoke tentatively: “Someone must have been, for there were always crowds everywhere he went, women screaming supportively, and used as shields?”

“I can name a large number of my clansmen who wanted peace,” Dajaal said, “which, in fact, was why we were holding the meeting. We didn’t like where the American-in-Charge and StrongmanSouth were taking us, and we didn’t approve of their confrontational styles. We thought they were so alike, the two of them, and wished they’d fight their own fight, in a duel — bang, bang, one of them dead!”

“How’s your granddaughter doing, the one who was caught up in the helicopter’s wake?” Jeebleh asked.

“She hasn’t spoken since that day.”

“How old is she?”

“She started to vegetate so early in her infancy,” Dajaal said, “that we don’t think about her age anymore. She startles easily, and the slightest noise causes her to burst into tears, and nothing will calm her. There’s nothing wrong with her motor mechanism. Dr. Bile has been of tremendous help, thank God, but I doubt if she’ll ever grow to be normal.”

“What about the mother?”

“What harm did the mother do to them?” Dajaal raged.

In his mind, Jeebleh saw a knight on horseback, sword in hand, ready to take vengeance and die in the service of justice. “What about the mother?” he repeated.

“To calm her down, they handcuffed her. Why?”

Bile was very lucky to have Dajaal as his man Friday, Jeebleh thought. The man struck him as upright, straightforward, and honorably courageous. Yet he couldn’t decide how far Dajaal’s loyalty would extend to him. He watched the road ahead in silent intensity, worried, like an insect focusing all it had in the way of wiliness to avoid being hurt.

The car suddenly stopped, and the driver and Dajaal exchanged a nod. Fear can make a man sit slightly off balance, as though he were hard of hearing, listening for an ominous sound, shoulders hunched, ears pricked. Jeebleh’s whole body went stiff, as he stared at the solitary Coke bottle that stood majestically in the center of the road. He didn’t know what to make of it. In a coordinated manner, the driver moved in the direction of the glove compartment at the same time that Dajaal lifted the machine gun off the floor with his feet, flinging it up and catching it just as Jeebleh had imagined earlier. He had agile feet, Dajaal did, and he deployed them more adeptly than some use their hands. A minute passed. Nothing happened. Then Dajaal and the driver spoke in low whispers. Jeebleh broke the grief: “Are we at the green line?”

Both Dajaal and the driver shook their heads and then, still not speaking, allowed themselves the rare luxury of smiling, in the loaded way two adults might exchange a smile when a child asks an inappropriate question. Their watchful eyes no longer on the Coke bottle, the driver and Dajaal communicated in gestures, after which the driver pressed the horn three times, once gently, twice decisively, then paused and waited.

An old man and two boys, all with guns, emerged from behind an abandoned building, the man leprous, one boy with his right foot clumsy with elephantiasis, the other boy afflicted with wrist-drop agony. The boys lowered their weapons, their lips traced with smiles of relief. The old man, whom Jeebleh presumed to be the father and the leader of the band, aimed his gun at the vehicle. As though on a dare, the car crept up to the Coke bottle, which fell on its side. Jeebleh watched this with mixed pity and amusement. Dajaal wound down his window and threw a wad of money tied with a rubber band at the feet of the old man.

The smaller of the boys bent down and retrieved the wad. It was only when the vehicle came level with them — near enough to smell their unwashed bodies — that Jeebleh realized that all three had imitation guns, poor-quality mahogany painted black.

“What are they?” he asked.

Maybe Dajaal picked up on his unease or maybe he didn’t, but Jeebleh was instantly regretful, wishing he had said “who” instead of “what.”

The driver spoke for the first time, his accent clearly from Mudugh. “Down in the south,” he said, “we call them ‘idiots of the north.’”

“Because they are a harmless lot?”

Dajaal had had enough. “Let’s get going!”

And as the vehicle moved, Dajaal explained that the “three-man militia” had their checkpoint in a no-man’s-territory, in the belief that they could continue profiting from their stickups. “Myself, I’m impressed with their cunning, because they expose a major weakness in the idea of the clan. After all, they too claim to represent the interests of a clan family — even if it’s the smallest unit within the larger clan to which the two principal contestants, StrongmanSouth and StrongmanNorth, also belong. It’s clever of them to poach in the no-man’s-territory, claiming their share in what is to be got.”

The car slowed, the driver changing gears, looking this way and that. He signaled left but took a right and then — how very odd — reversed, managing to avoid a mound of dirt. They were at a crossroads. A cluster of children appeared. They stood by, watching.

“We’re now entering the no-man’s-territory, where the so-called green line is,” the driver said, pointing at a spot in the road to his right.

This was comparable to pointing at a spot in a river and saying that one’s parents had drowned there several years before. To Jeebleh, Mogadiscio’s green line and the no-man’s-land both expressed not so much inadequate demarcations of territories, but rather the absence of compromise between the realities and the political zeal of the warlords. Such a line, and that no-man’s-land, would continue to exist as long as these incompetent men refused to reach a compromise.

The roads had no names. No flags flew anywhere near where the car was now parked, and there were no sheds, however ramshackle, to mark the spot. For the first time on this drive, there were a lot of people, busy as shoppers; buses disgorging more people; lean-to shacks, where you could have tea; stalls where women ran their haberdasheries.

“Can I step out?” Jeebleh asked.

“And do what?” said the driver.

“I’d like to have a feel of the place, if I may.”

“We would advise you not to,” the driver told him.

Jeebleh nonetheless got out of the vehicle, leaving the door ajar, and crouched in the bent-knee posture of a supplicant before a deity. Passersby, men and women hurrying to catch the bus that would take them somewhere, gawked at him, some looking amused, others uncomprehending. What was he doing? Humbling himself before the god of peace, or Mother Earth herself? The driver shouted to him to get back in the car.

A quarter of a kilometer later, they stopped so unexpectedly that the car slid forward when the driver braked. Several armed youths in military fatigues, who had materialized out of nowhere as far as Jeebleh could tell, flagged them down. The oldest would have been in his twenties, and none of them had proper shoes to give their uniforms respectability. They seemed thuggish to Jeebleh, all boasting the armed youth’s standard chipmunk cheeks, their jaws busy chewing qaat. Their eyes were bloodshot and sore with exhaustion.

One of the youths recognized Dajaal, and said, “What if I hadn’t recognized you? We could’ve shot you. Be careful next time. Now get going, and fast!”

Once the car had driven off, Jeebleh asked, “What do they do to people they don’t know?”

“They make a nuisance of themselves,” Dajaal said, “they open the trunk of your car, pretending to check for weapons to confiscate, or for contraband goods on which StrongmanSouth’s income revenue police levy a hefty duty. Often, they take the goods themselves as their share, since they are members of StrongmanSouth’s militia. I would say every major and minor warlord runs the territory under his nominal control profitably.”

“Does StrongmanSouth provide them with the uniforms?”

“No.”

“Who, then?”

“Gadhafi has sent a planeload of these army fatigues,” the driver said, “and the AK-47s are available in the open market and cost only six dollars apiece. StrongmanSouth allows them a free run of the place every now and then, and supplies them with their daily ration of qaat, or at least enough cash with which to buy it.”

Another kilometer and three more checkpoints, and the vehicle came to a halt. Informed that they had arrived, Jeebleh gave a sigh of relief. Here, it was all peaceful. They were before a huge building, which he remembered serving as the State Secretariat. In the sixties, soon after independence, the prime minister and other important ministers had had their offices here. Now the building was rundown, the pillars about to collapse, and thatch and mud huts occupied what used to be parking lots. Jeebleh relaxed when he saw people behaving normally, children playing, women busy at braziers, cooking or washing.

“Is this The Refuge?” he asked.

Dajaal shook his head.

“What is it, then?”

Dajaal called out the name of a man, who then came running out of a side door. He was introduced as the day watchman, and Jeebleh learned that he would take him to the apartment where Bile awaited him.

8

JEEBLEH WALKED A COUPLE OF PACES BEHIND THE DAY WATCHMAN escorting him to Bile’s apartment, serene at the sight of sunlight on the old man’s bald patch. He walked in step with the man, and tried to remain attentive to all his movements, as he expected he’d be returning without a guide.

They were now in a narrow corridor, with a closed door to their left, and one slightly ajar on the right. The watchman led him past a metal gate, then down a ravaged staircase. They walked past a huge void, which may once have housed an elevator; who knows, Jeebleh thought with a chill, dead bodies may have once been thrown down the shaft. He wondered where they were, in a basement of some sort, close to a building that had been an annex to a government ministry. He was disheartened by the water he saw leaking everywhere. Scarcely had he decided that the building was not at all inhabited when he heard the distant voices of children and smelled onions being fried. Somewhat relieved, he followed the watchman down another half a dozen devastated steps before they were out of the building. Then up a stairway a-scatter with geckos, past a half-demolished wall crawling with cockroaches, past a bricked-up door, past a window with half a glass pane, and then through cavernous rooms with no doors. Jeebleh was depressed to bear witness to so much destruction, and to the fact that what the plunderers didn’t have the will to destroy simply fell into destruction on its own.

Soon they exited again, and walked through an arch and into a large courtyard with a communal kitchen where women were cooking, and where toilets, their doors hanging on broken hinges, emitted a foul odor. The place swarmed with well-fed children at play, like puppies after feeding time. Jeebleh’s furtive look fell on the watchman, who comported himself in the reverential way of a commoner approaching royalty: deferentially, knees slightly bent, as in a curtsy, and with a smile of sterling quality. From this, Jeebleh deduced they were on Bile’s floor.

The open courtyard, kept spotlessly clean, boasted a freshly painted wall, and windows apparently recently repaired — there were X’s on the panes, evidence the glass was new. They walked to a metal door, and the watchman pressed a bell. As they waited for an answer, Jeebleh read the verse scrawled in an upright Celtic hand on a plaque attached to the door lintel: “Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God!” He was pondering its meaning, whether it was from the Bible or some other scripture, and wondering who might have put it there, when the door opened.

BILE WAS STANDING IN THE DOORWAY, CLAD IN A SMILE OF WELCOME, HIS ARMS open and raised, in anticipation of taking Jeebleh into his embrace. The two friends hugged very warmly.

At about six feet, Bile was a head taller than Jeebleh, but Jeebleh was a lot heavier. With the tears of joy suppressed, the emotion of their reunion seemed momentarily under some restraint, as each remembered how he had visited the other in many dreams. In Jeebleh’s dreams, Bile’s arrival would often be heralded by the buzzing of a bee quietly, busily, and positively constructing a cosmos of harmony, a bee knowing not a moment of idleness — generous, loving, and kind to all. Jeebleh’s arrival, in Bile’s dreams, would be announced by the neighing of a young horse breaking loose; and when Jeebleh came to take his leave, the horse would be replaced by an eagle flying into the outer reaches of the heavens.

“How wonderful to see you,” Jeebleh said.

Bile was blessed with young-looking skin of a reddish hue that reminded his friend of a light wood treated to assume the darker tint of mahogany. He wore jeans, a T-shirt, and Indian thongs, and was much thinner than Jeebleh had remembered; he had a slight stoop, the result, perhaps, of aging in a prison cell. Otherwise, he appeared to be in good physical shape, his gaze bright, with the gentlest of smiles. When they hugged again, even more warmly, the crown of Jeebleh’s baldness came into raspy contact with Bile’s day-old stubble.

Even though visibly happy to be reunited with his friend, Bile had the expression of a man who had just emerged from a very long night of sorrow; now frowning, now grinning, he might have been suffering from an upset stomach. His thoughts provided their own subtext, prompting a shudder in Jeebleh as Bile broke the calm by reciting the verse above the door in a booming voice: “Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God!”

They became conscious of the watchman, still standing at the open door, looking rather sheepish, waiting, perhaps, for baksheesh and a thank you before being dismissed. Bile brought out a wad of cash and gave it to the man. Once he was gone, Bile slammed the door shut and turned his back on Jeebleh, ready to bring his idleness to a profitable end. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked.

“Yes, please!”

JEEBLEH STOOD TO THE SIDE OF A WINDOW WITH THE CURTAINS HALF DRAWN, and Bile stood away from the window in the cautious attitude of someone spying on what was happening outside without being seen. They were so full of joy that every now and then one or the other spoke of the pleasure of being together again. Now it was the nth time for Bile to say, “It’s so good to see you!”

As Jeebleh studied the scene outside the window, the devastation and the ugly shacks, he remembered his and Bile’s childhood: how each was strong where the other was weak. Jeebleh tended to be obsessive in pursuit of his goals. Bile was quicker and brighter, adept at anything to which he put his mind. He was an excellent athlete, who won medals in science and art too. He was, however, weak in the department of decision making. Nor did he have the guts to speak his mind, forever postponing the day when he might stand up to the daily battering meted out to him by Caloosha. Although Bile and Jeebleh were not related by blood or marriage, they were raised in the same household, and had laid the foundation of their closeness in what they called “a land all our own.” In Jeebleh’s scheme of things, there was no place for tormentors. In Bile’s scheme of things, life had its ugly surprises for those who were ugly of heart and cruel of mind. Desperate to move him into action, Jeebleh would have liked Bile to defend himself in word and deed. Time and again, not only would Bile balk at the suggestion that he fight back at his half brother, but he would discourage his friend from confronting Caloosha, even if they had privately decided to avenge themselves with violence. Thus there was never the choice of a truce, and many predicted that their conflict with Caloosha was set to continue until death.

Out the window, Jeebleh noticed a pile of rock-strewn earth, with stones placed on the summit. “What’s that down below?” he asked.

“A child’s tomb.”

“A tomb in the middle of the city?”

“At times, people are so scared to go to the cemeteries that they resort to burying their young ones close by, in tombs they improvise in their own neighborhoods.”

“Who are the people sheltering in the building?”

“They’re some of the displaced,” Bile said, “who’ve come here because of the fighting in their regions of the country. We get an influx whenever there are confrontations between the armed militias.”

“Is this The Refuge, then?”

“No,” he said. “The Refuge is close by, a few minutes’ walk from here. It has its own compound and permanent staff. The displaced who live here are an extension of The Refuge, in the sense that we provide them with food, run a school for them, and see to their health needs whenever we have to. But we refer to them as ‘the tourists,’ because their visits are often brief. When the conflict subsides, most of them return to where they came from, to their homes and properties.”

As they sat down, Jeebleh wondered to himself whether he could get used to the schizoid life that had become Bile’s: living in relative physical comfort, but dealing constantly with abject poverty, disheartening sorrow. He wouldn’t be at peace with his own conscience if he lived comfortably, yet so close to such miseries on a daily basis.

Jeebleh’s restless gaze landed on a bit of scriptural wisdom framed and hung on the wall, a runic inscription that read: “The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood!”

“Whose apartment is this, then?”

“Everything here is Seamus’s handiwork,” Bile replied. “It was Seamus who hammered in every nail, and who copied the inscription over the entrance, and the verse on the wall too.”

“I had no idea that he was here,” Jeebleh cried happily. “Where is he?”

“He’s away, but he’ll be back in a few days.”

“So I’ll get to see him?”

“I hope so.”

“That’s wonderful!” Jeebleh now looked around the apartment with a more critical eye. “Seamus built all this? I didn’t know he was such an accomplished artist.”

“We decided, Seamus and I, to create an oasis of comfort here. Technically, the apartment is his, but I share it on and off, and Raasta and Makka have a room where they play, and stay in when they sleep over.”

At the mention of the girls’ names, Jeebleh saw a cloud of sorrow covering Bile’s features. And he spoke of them in the present tense too.

“Is he with an Irish NGO or something?”

“He’s here to help me.”

“That’s very dedicated of him.”

“Running The Refuge and the clinic is my principal occupation,” Bile said, “and Seamus sees to the smooth functioning of both. He is very punctilious, able to tell us how much we’ve spent on this, how much on that, how much money we have in the kitty, and how much more we need to raise. He goes back and forth a great deal between Mogadiscio and Dublin, where his mother is ailing and bedridden. But when he’s here, which is a lot of the time, he handles the daily chores and The Refuge’s demanding correspondence. I’m in charge of the core ideas, but he’s the nuts-and-bolts man, who makes them work. He’s our carpenter, when we need one, our interior decorator, our masseur, our male nurse, and our general advisor on matters mysterious. He’s his helpful self, you’ll remember that from our days in Padua. When something mechanical breaks down, he fixes it. I am not technical at all, in fact can’t change a fuse. He’s the man we call on when a door hinge falls off, or the roof of the clinic springs a leak. He is there at all hours, never complaining. In short, he’s a godsend! On his way back here this time, he’ll buy spare parts for the clinic generator, which has broken down. The young man on night duty switched it on without checking if there was sufficient oil in it.”

As Bile was talking, Jeebleh noticed how awful his teeth were. Since his arrival, Jeebleh had become obsessed with teeth. He caught himself thinking about them quite often, and about what bad teeth the youths he had met had. The sight of Bile’s teeth broke his heart, especially because the man seemed fit and healthy otherwise.

When Jeebleh realized that Bile had fallen silent, he felt embarrassed and guilty. But then he spoke: “I hope Seamus will be back before I leave.”

“You’ve only just got here,” Bile said. “Don’t tell me you’re already thinking of leaving?” Teasing, he added: “What’s the matter with people from Europe and North America? Always on the go, and on speeded-up time too!”

“I may have to depart in a hurry,” Jeebleh said.

“And why would you do that?”

Jeebleh didn’t mean to be secretive, but he didn’t want to talk about what he wanted to do. He needed time to find out more about Raasta and consider what help he might offer to recover her, and what to do about Caloosha and whom to recruit to do him in, if that was what he and Bile agreed to. He could understand Bile’s looking offended, shut out, or puzzled. He explained, “We’ll have the opportunity talk about things at length.”

Bile stole a glance at his watch. Jeebleh felt so uneasy that he swallowed some dry air, almost choking on it.

Bile wondered whether the years separating them and the bad blood that could make each distance himself from the other had given them an alternative memory, so that they might have difficulty remaining as good friends as they once were. Maybe it was wise not to talk about the past, or about what they had each been up to since then. They did not have time for this, and especially not today, for Bile had the clinic to attend to.

“How has your visit been so far?” he asked now.

Jeebleh became as restless as a colt. He turned away from the window, and his hand came casually into contact with his shirt pocket, where he carried his passport and cash. He appeared eager to get off his chest something that had been bothering him for decades, ever since he had left the country. Instead of answering Bile’s question, he sprang a surprise on his friend: “How have you dealt with Caloosha? Do you meet him often? Tell me about your relationship with him.”

Bile said nothing. Maybe, in his own way, he was making a point: that they viewed Caloosha differently, which explained why, up to now, he had not done anything about him.

Jeebleh insisted, “Do you see him at all?”

“This is a divided city, and you’ll discover when you’ve been here for a few days that you seldom run into people,” Bile replied. “We remain confined within the part of the city where we live, and try as much as we can to avoid contact with others.”

“What’s his occupation?”

“He is a consultant to StrongmanNorth on security matters.”

“Does he have his own detail of bodyguards?”

“He does.”

Bile saw that Jeebleh was apparently intent on dealing with Caloosha, whatever this was supposed to mean. But Bile was not prepared to jump into uncharted waters. Now he understood why Jeebleh had spoken earlier of possibly having to leave in a hurry — maybe after accomplishing his mission?

“We’ll have to talk more about all this,” Bile said, and again looked at his watch, ostensibly to let Jeebleh know that they didn’t have the time to do so now. And then he repeated his own question. “How has your visit been so far? I’m curious.”

“No one has a kind word to say about anyone else.”

“Civil wars bring out the worst in us,” Bile said. “There’s terrible bitterness that comes at you from every direction, everyone busy badmouthing everyone else, everyone reciting a litany of grievances. You’ll hear this one is a robber, that one is a murderer, that one a plunderer. Sadly, no one bothers to provide you with even flimsy circumstantial evidence to support the charges.”

The talk of robbery and plunder reminded Jeebleh of his passport and all the cash he was carrying. “Do you have a safe?” he asked.

“We do, somewhere here. Why?”

“I need to deposit my valuables.”

Bile pointed vaguely to a rug on the floor and explained that underneath was the safe — custom-built by Seamus of reinforced steel, with a digital lock.

Jeebleh brought out the wallet with the passport and money. Bile was immediately up on his feet, and the two of them shifted chairs, rolled up the rug, and lifted a section of the pine flooring. “Our Seamus at his most genial,” Jeebleh said excitedly.

When he had stored his things, he said, “Much of my life, when I look back at it, strikes me as a half-remembered dream. But I remember certain episodes with clarity. I remember our mothers, Caloosha and what he did to us, and of course I remember Seamus and the three of us in Italy.” Jeebleh’s grin was as gentle as the water’s surface in the wake of a duckling. “How much of your Plotinus do you still remember?” He recited quietly: “Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike.”

“In other words,” Bile interpreted the philsopher’s wisdom aloud, as though for his own edification, “an artist representing an image cannot presume to be an artist unless he is able to be the very figure being represented. Likewise, a man with a radical image who’s spent years in detention for political reasons must act forthrightly and without fear of the consequences.”

Jeebleh’s gaze launched itself into the shadowed darkness of an owl, bearing in its hoot a message of doom. Was it because Bile had quietly spun Jeebleh’s Italian nostalgia back to Mogadiscio? “What’s the latest about Raasta?” he asked.

Bile sat up so fast that he knocked his cup over, spilling some of the coffee sediments. Now both were on their feet, clumsily cleaning, Jeebleh dabbing at the low table and then the floor with a cloth.

“Not much more than what’s been in the papers,” Bile said, and paused judiciously. “We’re following a few leads.”

“So far no harm has been done to either girl?”

“We have no way of knowing.”

“How’s Shanta taking it?”

“It’s always hardest on a mother,” Bile said. “Shanta is in the habit of going off on excursions into the land of the insane.” He paused again. “It’s been very hard on her.”

“No word about Faahiye’s whereabouts?”

“I hear he’s left for Mombasa.”

“I’d like to see Shanta.”

His voice very faint, Bile said, “You will.”

It was as though a healing heart had been broken open. Lips closed, Bile ceased his breathing as he smothered his tearful emotions.

A phone rang, and he went to answer it in the study.

WAITING IN THE APARTMENT FOR BILE TO RETURN, JEEBLEH ENTERTAINED himself with memories dating back to before he and his friend were separated. Bile in those days had thought of himself as a kindred spirit of Plotinus, the ancient philosopher, born in today’s Asyut around A.D. 205. A hardworking, principled man, austere in his style of living and in the way he ran his personal affairs. He was said to be always in touch with both his spirituality and the material side of life. A man of peace, he arbitrated in the disputes of communities at war and managed to bring them closer without alienating either side. He also ran a charitable house, one section of it alive with the noise of young orphans, another part filled with destitute widows. Jeebleh recalled that after a book, The Life of Plotinus, had been smuggled into Bile’s prison cell and he had been caught reading it, he was severely punished. Bile returned from the study. He looked fine after the phone call, but Jeebleh sensed that the world in which they found themselves was ailing.

“How well do you know Af-Laawe?” Jeebleh asked.

“What can I say?”

“What’s his story?”

“You know the proverb—‘Tell me the names of your friends, and I’ll tell you who you are.’ Caloosha is his closest associate.” Bile clenched his hand tensely in a fist, his thumb inserted between forefinger and middle finger, in the vulgar Italian gesture of a fig.

“Is he a fraud?” Jeebleh asked.

“People speak of money missing from the UN coffers.”

“And why his nickname, ‘Marabou’? Just because of his funeral business?”

“You wouldn’t think you arrived only yesterday.” Bile smiled like a man who knew no sadness. After a pause, he went on: “He’s described by many as a cool customer and a con artist. So watch out, my friend!”

“Any idea what’s become of the stolen money?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“And his NGO Funerals with a Difference?”

“He claims to bury the unclaimed corpses gratis, with free prayers for the soul of the dead thrown in for good measure,” Bile said. “But there’s a much darker side to his dealings. Shanta can tell you more than I.”

Again the phone rang, but this time Bile chose not to answer it.

STILL IGNORING THE PHONE — THE PERSON CALLING HADN’T USED THE CODE — Bile poured more coffee. The memory of sorrow flooded his vocal cords as he spoke. “Please accept my belated condolence over your mother’s death. She was like a mother to me too, and I miss her!”

“Maybe death was kind to her, coming when it did.”

“Unfortunately she depended entirely on Caloosha and her housekeeper,” Bile said, “and they were awful to her, I’ve heard. Caloosha had misled her, making her believe his version of events.”

“My letters to her were returned unopened.”

“I wouldn’t put anything past Caloosha.”

“Would you know how to reach my mother’s housekeeper?”

“We’ll ask around,” Bile said. “Shanta might.”

“And might she know where her grave is?”

“I doubt it, but we’ll ask,” Bile said. “Shanta has been in no state to think about anyone or anything else since Raasta’s disappearance. But I’m sure that with her help and Dajaal’s, we can locate your mother’s housekeeper, and then her grave.”

“I would appreciate it.”

Jeebleh noticed some potted plants, where a mantis, comfortable in its camouflage, was preparing to ambush another insect — swaying back and forth, head raised, fragile-looking forelegs extended, delicate body elegantly poised. Despite its devout posturing, the mantis was a predator, always on the attack. Jeebleh watched it in silent fascination, remembering the chameleon’s visit to his hotel room. The mantis bided its preying time, as slow as a sadist in its intention to torment its victim. Jeebleh couldn’t help comparing the antics of a mantis lying in wait, readying itself to pounce, to the modus operandi of a man who was a foe in the likeness of a concerned friend. He would act like the mantis and wait, lying low, until he was able to rid this society of vermin like Caloosha, a canker in the soul of his years of imprisonment and exile.

A housefly landed on Bile’s forehead: when chased away, it moved to Jeebleh, hesitating above his eyes and nose for a few seconds before finally and decisively alighting on his cheek. Not liking the housefly’s noise, the mantis slunk away quietly into hiding.

Now three phones rang all at once, and kept ringing. But Bile wasn’t prepared to answer them, not immediately. “I’d like you to move in with us,” he said. “There’s room for you. I’ve already prepared it, Raasta’s room.”

“Raasta’s?”

Bile looked so pale you would think he was hearing heavy treads on his own tomb. His sad expression caught the sun in its sweep, and Jeebleh stared at the specks of dust, recently stirred up by the restless housefly.

Bile went to answer the one phone that had not stopped ringing, and when he returned, he was in some distress. He spoke to Dajaal on his mobile, suggesting that he come to take Jeebleh back to the hotel.

“We have an emergency!” he told Jeebleh.

“Can I be of help?”

“I must be on my way to the clinic. Please arrange with Dajaal when you wish to be picked up,” Bile said. “Either later today, or tomorrow, or at the latest the day after.”

In less than ten minutes, Dajaal was at the door of the apartment, ready to escort Jeebleh to the hotel. Both Jeebleh and Bile knew that they had a lot more to say to each other, and knew too that they had time on their side.

They embraced for a long time before parting.

9

IN A DREAM OF THE NIGHT BEFORE, JEEBLEH KNEW WHERE THE CAPTORS were keeping Raasta and her companion — in a mud hut overlooking the noman’s-land between the two StrongMen. He was at a disadvantage, though, in that he had no transport of his own, and no one to bring him back to where he was staying, a beach cabin by the ocean. Nor did he have bodyguards to protect him in case he was attacked. Moving about was proving very difficult.

He was in an anteroom of the beach cabin, where a woman, name unknown and face unseen, lay on a mat, screaming her head off, occasionally mumbling to herself the name of the man to whom she addressed her pleas. To Jeebleh, the name sounded very much like “Caloosha.” Another woman, in a nurse’s uniform, was restraining the wailing woman and speaking to her in the patronizing tone that medical staff often use when chastising obstreperous patients. It wasn’t clear, in the dream, whether the screaming woman had attempted suicide. When he tried to find out the woman’s story and why her wrists were bandaged, an armed man in rags sealed his mouth with an asphyxiating gag. Later, after ridding himself of the gag, he tried to push his way past a bouncer with enormous sharp teeth. He was kicked in the groin for attempting to escape, and collapsed backward, in a hapless heap, groaning. He was in so much pain that he couldn’t get to his feet, and he wet himself.

AWAKE, JEEBLEH SAW THAT EVEN WITH ITS DISJOINTEDNESS AND LACK OF clarity, the dream had some highly detailed moments. He remembered the woman pleading to “Caloosha,” even though he had seen no sign of the man in the dream. He decided, on the basis of the dream, that he should seek out and solicit Caloosha’s help. Perhaps he would intercede with the hostagetakers.

But a few things in the dream raised warning signs, which worried and frightened him. A man had appeared, assigned to be his guide. He had eyes from which billows of smoke issued, and he held several lit cigarettes between his fingers. The man, a dwarf, needed to work out his daytime contradictions, and was now on stilts. He was a praise singer, and claimed that he had been commissioned to compose a panegyric for the boss of Mogadiscio’s underworld, “the fire of whose genius was unlike any other, and had no equal anywhere.” Sadly, Jeebleh couldn’t remember any of the lines, because the man whose voice reminded him of Af-Laawe had the wrong accent, his syntax was muddled, his diction lacked finesse, and his metaphors were mixed.

There were also marksmen in the dream, who took delight in demonstrating the skill of their shooting; they hit their targets lethally without breaking a bead of sweat. One of them had a mouth with baby lips that blew bubbles. At the center of the tableau was a small girl having her hair braided by her companion.

Despite his misgivings, the dream left Jeebleh with a sense of optimism, and he rose from his bed convinced that Caloosha held the key to the girls’ disappearance, and that he or one of his associates, namely Af-Laawe, knew where Raasta and Makka were being held. Quite possibly, Caloosha had helped the captors in a big way. In a moment of elation, Jeebleh believed that he would succeed in recovering the two girls from the clutches of their captors. But first he had to seek an audience with Caloosha. He would show humility, he would openly acknowledge Caloosha’s power over them all. To steel himself, Jeebleh recited two lines from a poem in Somali in which a weak man, plotting to kill a much stronger man, humbles himself before his intended victim, pretending he is a friend and no threat at all. But when the opportunity to hit presents itself, he strikes! Jeebleh would do as the poet suggested, and wait in ambush until after the girls’ release.

Shaved and showered, he took the piece of ruled paper on which Dajaal had drawn a map with directions to Caloosha’s villa. Smoothing the crumpled sheet, he followed the route with his forefinger, memorizing the sequence of turns in the road. He was sure he would find it easily, no trouble at all. He went downstairs and past the reception desk, which was unusually quiet today, to have his coffee. He moved as slowly as a chameleon going uphill.

WHILE JEEBLEH WAITED FOR HIS COFFEE, THE DAY SEEMED AS DULL-EYED AS a young elephant mourning the death of its family. The sun shone competently, its rays trudging through a thick film of dust. He sat facing the open area where, only the day before, the vultures had gathered. Today there wasn’t a single one. There was an Alsatian, though, pregnant by the look of it, and close to her, a crow, lonely-looking, brooding and quiet for much of the time.

Seeking out his tormentor was the last thing Jeebleh wanted to do. The decision to call on Caloosha was not an act of courage — it went against everything Jeebleh stood for and believed in. But the dream had strengthened his trust in the correctness of the decision. He would do all he could to help gain freedom for Raasta and Makka, even at the cost of feeling humiliated by a fool. Then he would figure out how to take vengeance on Caloosha, perhaps with help from Dajaal, to whom he intended to speak.

An only son, Jeebleh had been raised by a strong woman with iron determination. His father was a lowlife; he had sold the house the family lived in and the plot of land he had inherited from his own family to pay off gambling debts. After the divorce, Jeebleh’s mother made it her mission in life to ensure that Jeebleh grew up to be very different from his father. She impressed into his memory his uniqueness, repeatedly telling him that he could do anything he put his mind to.

She possessed no more than a brick-and-mud single-room hut, a barn with two cows and a calf tied to poles buried in the earth, an outdoor latrine, and an undying hope in her son’s future success. And even though she loved him to excess, she was firm with him. Within half a year of being divorced, she borrowed a few hundred shillings from a woman friend and started a neighborhood stall, selling tomatoes, onions, and matches spread on a cardboard box. Day in and day out, she sat on the very mat where she and her son slept at night.

One morning, two years after she had set up her warato stall, she became acquainted with a midwife living in the same neighborhood. The two women got talking, and they entered into a contract from which both would benefit. The midwife kept the oddest of hours, because of her vocation, and was away from home several days and nights at a stretch. Then she would be off work for a few days at a time. Jeebleh’s mother agreed to look after the midwife’s two sons, Caloosha and Bile, for a monthly fee. The elder of these sons was away at school until early afternoon, while the younger one, more or less Jeebleh’s age, had not started school yet.

A bright-eyed, active child, Bile was as adorable as Caloosha, his elder brother, was detestable — Caloosha, who had been born in breech position, almost killing his mother in the process. The two younger boys got along extremely well, and the midwife was pleased that her son had an ally in Jeebleh, who helped deter Caloosha from bullying his younger brother. Jeebleh trained so he could defend himself, and he tried to teach Bile, but with little success.

The midwife paid for the food and the household expenses, and Jeebleh’s mother kept Caloosha out of mischief as well as she could, at the same time protecting her son and Bile from his bullying. Raised as brothers in the household efficiently run by Jeebleh’s mother, and paid for by Bile’s, the two boys became very close.

The world in which Jeebleh and Caloosha would be meeting today, if they met at all, differed greatly from the one in which they had met as children, and from the one in which Jeebleh had been a political prisoner and Caloosha his jailer.

The youth who came with the pot of coffee Jeebleh had ordered also delivered a message: Apparently a few clansmen of Jeebleh’s were at the front gate of the hotel, waiting to be let in. The men on sentry duty, the youth explained, wanted to know whether or not Jeebleh was prepared to receive them. When Jeebleh inquired how many there were, he learned that there were half a dozen, eager to speak to him about “family matters.”

Jeebleh told the youth that he wanted to drink his coffee in peace. He had other things on his mind, actually, and was in no mood to entertain a group of elder men who were likely only to bring further clan-related complications into his life. He finished his coffee and left by the back gate.

THE ROUGHLY DRAWN MAP TO CALOOSHA’S PLACE IN HIS HAND, JEEBLEH walked fast, with the light-footed gait of someone who knew where he was headed. He might have been a thief avoiding an angry mob sent to apprehend him. He wanted to get away from his clansmen, that was all.

He recalled how his mother had done everything possible to make sure that she and her only son would have nothing to do with this clan business. As a young woman, she had been given in marriage to a gambler with no self-honor, because he paid a dozen cows and a donkey as a dowry to her family. She hoped to raise her son in an enlightened way, educate him and make him believe in his own worth as a man. Soon after entering into her contract with the midwife, she bought herself a Singer sewing machine and, for starters, tailored the family’s clothes: her own and her son’s, and the two other boys’ and their mother’s as well. Her son was given the nickname “Jeebleh”—“the one with the pockets”—because his shirts, shorts, and trousers had huge pockets.

It was on a day such as this, when his so-called clansmen came around to be received as his blood, that he appreciated what the two inveterate loners had created.

No doubt the clansmen were there to remind him of his responsibility toward his blood community. He remembered how often his mother had warned him against such opportunists, who would turn up at his door with their begging bowls when he was doing well — the very same men and women who would disappear when he was the one in need. She had also warned him against Caloosha, whose cruel behavior was a threat to the continued existence of the family she and the midwife had so carefully held together. “Be your own man,” she would say, “not anyone else’s. And beware of your clansmen. They’ll prove to be your worst enemies, and they are more likely than not to stab you in broad daylight if you choose to have nothing to do with them.”

He walked purposefully, his heartbeat quickening with each step. There was no authority to dreams if the happenings during one’s waking hours did not tally with their thrust, he decided. He prayed himself sick, wishing for success in whatever he was trying to achieve.

A moment’s distraction helped him notice a richly woven spiderweb hanging down between the open-ended spaciousness of the morning sun and a mango tree, laden with its seasonal yield. While admiring the bewitching spectacle, he saw an old man in colorful rags hungrily demolishing a mango with the self-abandon of a child. The old man’s fingers must have been as sweet as a beehive, and a swarm of eager wasps descended on them, taking off and landing again, following every movement of his hands. A closer look at the man revealed a more disturbing sight: his highly unfocused gaze. The man washed his hands with water from a pitcher, then dried them, and started to speak as the mad do, wisely.

The old man was fascinating to listen to and wonderful to watch, his every gesture theatrical, and his voice a memorable baritone. Soon enough a crowd formed near him, and the space around the tree filled with curious spectators, including Jeebleh. The man spoke on and on, in speech so disjointed that not everything he said made sense to Jeebleh. But he could not tear himself away, and he stood there fascinated. The man behaved as hypnotists do, self-confident, as if aware of where his strengths lay. He seemed to be saying that the trouble with self-isolated communities was that they were “as unhealthy as a child’s toenail growing inward.” The crowd around the mango tree listened attentively. At one point, the man fell silent, then looked steadily at Jeebleh, outstaring him. A woman standing near Jeebleh raised her naked son so he might see what she described as “the spectacle.”

The old man was now proposing that a beggar given to spurious changes of mood was a dangerous one. “So beware, my brothers and sisters, of such beggars. Beware too of our politicians who think and behave like beggars— one day, they act normally and ask for donations from the international community, and the next day, they kill the foreigners who’ve come to help.”

He then asked the crowd, “Are you mad?” When no one responded, he asked, “Am I mad, then?” No one spoke. “Are you mad or are you sane? I want you to separate yourselves into two groups, those who are mad, and those who are sane.”

But nobody moved. The man repeated his instructions, and again nobody moved. People appeared disturbed by his indiscretion, and yet no one was ready to challenge him or oblige. Murmurs of disapproval were heard, the din growing louder as people talked among themselves. Even so, no one stood apart, or walked away, and no one declared himself to be mad or sane; everyone found comfort in staying with the crowd.

The old man changed his tack: “What if I asked you to separate yourselves into those who’ve murdered and those who haven’t? Will all those who’ve murdered please gather here to my left, and all those who’ve not murdered or harmed anyone, who’ve raped no woman, looted no property, will they please stand here to my right?”

Nobody obliged, but Jeebleh’s curious gaze fell on a military type, who broke into a heavy sweat. Now the old man danced a jig, and as he did so he had a smirk on his face, and his hands moved as though in imitation of a trained dancer performing the classical Indian dance-drama Kathakali — or so thought Jeebleh. The man cut a most impressive figure, with his stylized gestures now in vigorous motion, now gentle, his whole body moving in obligatory pursuit of a ritual, his index finger close to his nose, his hard stare focused on it, his squint disarming. The crowd grew, as more people came. The last group to arrive included a drummer, who beat in rhythm to the man’s chants.

Having seen and heard enough, Jeebleh left the area. A man followed him. When Jeebleh slowed, he noted that the man was keeping pace with him. He turned to confront the man shadowing him, looked at him fixedly, and said with a wry smile, “Are you mad or are you sane? Are you a murderer? Are you innocent of all crimes?”

“Ask me a serious question, and I’ll give an answer,” replied the man, his stare iron-tough.

“Don’t you think these are serious questions nowadays?”

There was something fierce about this man with rough edges, the type you see in films. The hard-stare guy introduced himself: “My name is Kaahin.” And he extended his hand to Jeebleh, who remembered his encounter with Af-Laawe at the airport and decided not to shake it.

“What do you want?” Jeebleh asked.

“I want to know which group you’d join.”

“I’ve never killed or harmed anyone,” Jeebleh said.

“So you say!”

“What about you? Which would you join?”

“The murderers, of course,” Kaahin said, and guffawed.

Jeebleh saw now that the man’s eyes wandered away, toward two men who were standing apart, smoking. Like him, they were military types, but too old to be part of a fighting force. If they were no longer in active service, Jeebleh guessed, they would be acting as consultants to security firms, or as deputies to a warlord, or as well-paid bodyguards to a VIP or to foreign dignitaries visiting the country. To a man, their postures gave them away.

The man calling himself Kaahin said, “Where are you when it comes to brothers and blood?”

“Have you ever heard of Hesiod?” Jeebleh replied.

“Who’s he?”

“A poet who lived in the eighth century B.C.” Jeebleh didn’t like the amused look on Kaahin’s face, but he continued, trying to appear unbothered: “Hesiod advises that you take along a witness when you’re in a dispute with your brother or one of your intimates over matters of great importance.”

“Well, perhaps I could be of some use to you, then.”

“In what way?”

“In leading you to someone you want to see.”

“I’m not with you.”

“I’m offering to be in your service,” Kaahin said.

“What will you do for me?”

“I’ll come along as your witness.”

“Pray, who will I be meeting, and why do I need a witness?” Jeebleh started to walk away, pretending he had no idea what the man was talking about.

“I’ll take you to Caloosha,” Kaahin said.

One of the military men led the way, the other walked behind. Jeebleh was sure that several others were shadowing them from a distance, even if they were invisible to him. They moved forward, in the direction of what he hoped was Caloosha’s house.

10

JEEBLEH ENTERED A LIVING ROOM OVERCROWDED WITH FURNITURE AND immediately sensed the dark movements of a few figures, and then heard the sound of curtains being closed or opened. Likewise he could not determine whether the footsteps he heard on the staircase were gingerly going up or coming down.

In a corner of the room, a cat was trailing a spool wound with thread, which it pushed around so coquettishly that Jeebleh was quite taken with the acrobatic performance. This was when Caloosha made his staged entry. By the time Jeebleh became aware of his presence, Caloosha was already seated in the singularly placed high chair. Reduced to a sideshow, the cat pawed at the spool for a few more seconds, and then lost interest. Eventually, it walked out of the room altogether. Kaahin and his men spread out, one of them approaching Jeebleh where he stood.

“So here you are at last, my long-lost junior brother!” Caloosha said.

Jeebleh fought shy of applauding sarcastically, aware that Caloosha had worked very hard on his rehearsed delivery; he enunciated the phrase “long-lost junior brother” to give a sharp, cutting quality. He might as well have said, “Now, what have you got to say for yourself?” That Caloosha was upset was also obvious, but not why.

Jeebleh took his time, comparing his memory of Caloosha when he had seen him last with the specimen in the high chair. He was looking at a man with a more prominent nose than he remembered, a much fatter man, with so distended a paunch it spilled over his belt and lay flat in his lap. His face was puffy, the hair was thin on his skull, patchy, and peppered with gray at the sides. He could easily have done a send-up of a Buddha, only he had no wisdom to impart. Alas, the years had not humbled the fool in the least.

“It’s been naughty of you to come to my city and to stay in a hotel,” Caloosha said, his double chin trembling, his breathing uncomfortable. “You could’ve stayed here. I’ll tell it to your face, it’s been very naughty of you, very, very naughty. Yes, that’s how I feel, that’s how I feel, and I’ll speak about it.”

Ever since childhood they had been at loggerheads, and the memory of how Caloosha had again and again hurt him returned with a vengeance, causing Jeebleh to display his rage right away, and violently. The question now uppermost in his mind was how to keep from losing his cool.

“Is this a way to welcome a long-lost junior brother?” he said.

“Admit it, you’ve been naughty!”

“Maybe you could be nice to me for a change.”

“How do I do that?”

“Humor me, but don’t shout at me.”

“Cut the crap,” Caloosha said, “and explain how you ask to be taken to a hotel in my part of the city. I have this big villa all to myself.”

“Af-Laawe suggested that I put up there.”

“Because you asked him to!”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“I’ve heard all about you and what you’ve been up to since your arrival,” Caloosha said, wagging a finger in mock threat.

This gave Jeebleh a tremor of unredeemed guilt. Might Caloosha have any idea what murderous thoughts were actually brewing in his mind? “I don’t like it that we’re fighting on our first meeting after so many years,” he said. “Can we allow peace to reign, at least for the time being? You can see that I’ve come to pay my respects to you, I’ve come to make amends, not to quarrel.”

They stared at each other with the fierceness of unresolved conflict. After a long silence, Jeebleh stammered, “Unfortunately, I had no way of reaching you.”

“You’re a liar!”

Jeebleh was at a loss for words, and he looked about the room as if he might find there the expressions that were eluding him. He saw Kaahin and his two sidekicks, and thought that even though he didn’t like what was being done to him, he wasn’t a fool and wouldn’t be misled into believing that he could gain anything by reacting violently. In the two days he had spent here, he had seen nothing but destruction, because none of the men at each other’s throats was prepared to compromise, and none showed humility. Where would arrogance lead him? It would create further rifts, cause more deaths, and spill more bad blood! He considered the possibility too that Caloosha was playing to the gallery, showing off for his buddies. Now he said, “I’m not a liar, and you know it.”

“Lying at your age. Shame on you!”

Jeebleh took a step to the right, and from the corner of his eye, he could see that Kaahin was moving watchfully closer to him. This was a badly acted piece of theater all around, and so he said, “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

Then he made to leave. He didn’t want to go — well aware that his departure would not bring him any nearer to learning how much Caloosha knew about where Raasta and her playmate were being held hostage, or who their captors were — and he suspected that Caloosha wouldn’t let him walk out like this.

“Af-Laawe has been to see me,” Caloosha blurted, “and he told me about your message to Bile, that you wanted to meet up with him. Why didn’t you send word to me too, unless you’re fibbing?”

“Maybe he forgot to deliver it?”

“He wouldn’t dare! It was I who alerted him to your arrival and sent him to greet you at the airport.”

“Truth-telling” sits awkwardly on evil men, Jeebleh thought. Caloosha’s distended belly was filled with sentiments of war and wickedness, which was why he looked so ugly, and so unhealthy. Attrition retarded his brain, evil dulled his imagination, did not sharpen it.

“How did you know what flight I was coming on?” Jeebleh asked.

“Because I know everything that happens hereabouts.”

Reminding himself of the purpose of his visit, Jeebleh smiled and chose not to be provoked. They might get somewhere if he didn’t deflate Caloosha’s inflated ego in the presence of his buddies.

“I’ve had you followed,” Caloosha asserted, “and I know where you’ve been, to whom you’ve spoken, what comments you’ve made, from the moment your plane landed until you walked in here. Tell me, are you or aren’t you a liar?”

Jeebleh felt like a mischievous pupil called to the headmaster’s office to explain why he had behaved badly. He didn’t know whether apologizing would help or play into the stronger hands of a brute, adept at exploiting a weakness in his character. He dodged and asked, “Where’s the family?”

“What family?”

“Your wife and children.”

A primal joy descended on Caloosha’s features, and his double chin trembled. It was touching to behold the sudden change in the man, whose expression was so infectious that Kaahin and his men grinned from cheek to cheek too. Jeebleh looked like a baby with a sweet tooth made to taste salt.

Caloosha intimated with a flick of his right hand that Kaahin and his companions should leave. Then he rose, heaving himself up and out of the high chair, and waddled toward Jeebleh, with every distended part of his body waggling. Jeebleh allowed himself to be hugged for the sake of peace. Caloosha smothered him in a fleshy, all-encompassing embrace. Jeebleh thought of women submitting themselves to men they loathed, for the love and safety of their children. Part of him didn’t wish to know what his life would be like after this embrace.

Jeebleh’s hand was entirely lost in Caloosha’s acquisitive grip. Even so, he thought it best not to withdraw, lest his action provoke a hostile reaction from his host. Now that they were standing close to each other, he saw how ugly the man was, short, fat, and always short of breath. “How are they, anyway, the family?”

“They’re all well.” Caloosha paced in circles as he spoke. “Do you know how many wives and how many children I have? Unlike you, I have twenty-two children, the perfect number for two soccer teams, with me as referee. I was married five times, and am currently married to three wives. I’ve been a grandfather seven times, all of them boys.”

“You’re married to three women?”

“That’s right.”

“Where are they, your families?”

“Almost all the children by my first five wives are in Holland, Sweden, and Denmark as asylum seekers, or in Canada and the U.S. as naturalized citizens. One of my wives is in Canada with her five children, another in the U.S. with seven, and so on and so on. In Canada and the U.S. my children changed their names to those of their mothers, fearing being linked to me, because of my earlier job. What a bore! But they’re all doing well, earning enough and living comfortably. In fact, the two oldest girls send me monthly remittances, but the boys think more often about themselves, their latest fads and the cars they drive, and seldom about their old man. But we thank God for His great mercies!”

Jeebleh said, “You must be relieved that they are all out of the country and out of harm’s way, what with the fierce fighting and all.”

“One of my current wives is here,” he said, and nearing Jeebleh, spoke in a whisper. “She’s somewhere in this villa, the latest acquisition of an old man ready to retire.” Crassly, his left hand went to his crotch, and made a show of caressing it.

“How did you acquire her?” Jeebleh asked.

“We blundered into each other,” he replied.

“Blundered into each other?”

“That’s one way of putting it. She and I blundered into each other out of fear, out of the loneliness of old age on my part, and out of the aloneness of youth on hers.”

There were no more mysteries to the brute, and Jeebleh could have killed him for that. If he did not act upon his visceral loathing, it was because the extent of Caloosha’s ugliness was so overbearing and revolting at the same time, and of course, he hadn’t the wherewithal to follow it through. Nor had the fool any sense of shame. The latest acquisition of an old man, indeed!

“Where did you find her?” Jeebleh asked.

“I found her alone after looters had emptied her family home and killed her parents. She was fifteen years old at the time, and was hiding in the attic, frightened out of her wits.”

“She could’ve been your granddaughter!”

“She’s very pretty, of Xamari descent,” Caloosha said with a grin and a wink. “And as I said before, we thank God for all His mercies, great and small. She’s been a blessing to me in my old age, my young thing.”

Jeebleh wondered what Caloosha had been doing in the girl’s family house after the looters had killed her parents and emptied the house of all that was useful. But because he doubted he would receive a true answer, he thought better of asking. Besides, such a question might take them away from where his own interest lay. Now he dwelled on Caloosha’s face, and concentrated on his eyes hooded with fat and hair, suspecting that he might read the man’s motives from his expression. As a ploy to humble himself, Jeebleh sat on a low three-legged stood diagonal to where Caloosha was standing. His gaze wandered leisurely across the settees, ottomans, and armchairs scattered about in spectacular disarray. Caloosha stopped moving in circles and took tortoise steps to a lounge chair, where he sat down. Not much of the furniture in the living room matched. Had he acquired the pieces through his various marriages, or from his looting sorties into the vacated homes of families who had fled the city, which was up for grabs during the initial stages of the civil war? Jeebleh was so upset he felt like the commander of a militia unable to hold a bridgehead seized in enemy territory.

“Whose house is this?” he asked.

“Mine,” came the answer.

Jeebleh believed that Caloosha was lying, that the house wasn’t his. There was something visibly aseptic about the place. It might be a minor warlord’s home, where he stashed away all his plunder. It looked too clean, like that of a small-time thief who regularly brought stolen goods into his private living space. Or could it be that the heavy furniture came with the young wife?

“Where is she?”

“My wife?”

“The young thing for your old age.”

“Have pity on a man of my advanced years, Jeebleh.” Caloosha displayed a kind of humor Jeebleh hadn’t thought him capable of.

Maybe the light footsteps on the staircase when he came in had been hers, Jeebleh thought. Was it also possible that the soap opera dialogue in Arabic that he could hear was coming from her satellite TV? He was tense, his tongue as heavy as a wet hammock. Married serially five times, currently the husband of three, with twenty-two children, seven grandchildren, all of them boys: maybe the man had a right to all the furniture that was on disorderly exhibition in the living room. Who would’ve thought that the phoenix of Caloosha’s day would rise from the ashes of his evil deeds after the collapse of the regime he so wickedly served? But there you were, he was alive and well and lording it now in the city of his clan family.

“How about your family?” Caloosha asked Jeebleh.

“I’ve spoken to them twice since coming here.”

“Your daughters are both of college age?”

Jeebleh nodded.

“The younger one is left-handed, yes?”

“No, it’s the older one who is.”

As though no longer certain of his facts, Caloosha hesitated, then asked, “One of them had a Burmese cat, the other a dog, yes?”

Jeebleh was unprepared for this, because he knew he hadn’t given these details to anyone in Mogadiscio, except maybe to his mother, in his chatty letters to her. Had the housekeeper been sharing secrets with Caloosha?

“If you’re asking yourself how it is that I know a lot about your wife and daughters,” Caloosha said, “it’s because I make it my business to know how things are with the people I feel close to.”

Angry words not to be freed now clung shapelessly to Jeebleh’s tongue. He was relieved that he didn’t let go of them, and that he changed the direction of their talk. “Can you do me a favor?” he said.

“If it’s in my power to.”

“Can you help me reach my mother’s housekeeper?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“I’d be most grateful,” he said, meaning it.

Caloosha stretched out his right hand and pressed a bell, which rang on the upper floor. A young woman, evidently the maid, came down the stairs and walked over to a table partially hidden from Jeebleh’s view. When he craned his neck, he saw her standing in front of two flasks, and as she prepared the coffee, water first and then an undrinkable instant, Caloosha explained that his younger brother from America took his coffee black, no sugar. The young woman went about her job with more professionalism than the youths at the hotel had done. From having seen the maid, who was from the Rivers People, he assumed that Caloosha’s wife would most likely be veiled, in which case she might not be permitted to meet him. Maybe the truth about her not coming down was even simpler. Caloosha spent much of his time downstairs with the military types, and his young wife and the maid spent all theirs upstairs, watching soaps on satellite TV, as bored housewives did the world over.

HE HATED THE TASTE OF HIS INSTANT COFFEE, AND ALMOST ASKED FOR SUGAR and milk. But then he didn’t like the thought of the bell’s ringing and the maid’s coming all the way down to serve them. He was formulating the question “Where were you when the state collapsed?” but lest it sound tacky, didn’t ask it. Instead, he said, “Where were you when the Dictator fled the city?”

“I was here.”

The blueprint of a lie stared Jeebleh in the eye. But he chose not to allow the lie to blind him to his ultimate purpose. “Which side were you on, then?” he said. “With your employer, the Dictator, and against the militiamen fighting to overthrow him, or against him and with the militia recruited from the rank and file of the clan?”

Caloosha’s features resembled a boarded-up house that hadn’t enjoyed fresh air or sunshine for some time: a lifeless house, without light.

After a long pause, he said: “I did what I had to when I was battered by a blind storm: I organized myself, and discovered that I could only work on a short-term plan to survive. I thought hard when everyone helped themselves to the properties left empty by the ‘chased-out’ families!”

“What did your short-term plan produce?”

“When you work on a short-term plan, you think about yourself, not about the past, where the problem began, nor about the future, where there’ll be other problems waiting in ambush. I prepared myself for peace.”

Before he knew it, Jeebleh was shouting: “Was peace uppermost in your mind when you locked us up?”

“You know the answer to your question.”

“I’d like to hear it from you all the same.”

Caloosha was in the shade, the sunlight in the room having moved on, as though shunning him. He seized up, his eyes narrowing, his sight dimming, and broke into a cold sweat, his forehead ringed with beads of perspiration. “I trained in the Soviet Union, where obedience was drilled into me, obedience to my superiors first and last,” he said. “That was what the manual taught us. I was trained to act as though I was stationary while in motion. One of my Soviet instructors liked to compare his students who were training to be in the national security business in their countries, to hunters moving with the stealth of one who is prepared to kill and be killed. I am not an intellectual, you and Bile are. I am a military man. I obey the instructions given to me by my superiors.”

“Why was I released?” Jeebleh could feel that the intensity of the conversation was pushing to the brink of something disastrous, but he couldn’t stop himself.

“Those were my instructions.”

“Why was Bile kept in prison?”

“You’re putting your questions to the wrong man, and you’re making me unnecessarily nervous. I’m not the man you should ask.” Caloosha paused, perspiring liberally. “You don’t need me to tell you that a dictator makes his decisions without advice from his subalterns. I don’t need to tell you that a tyrant’s fickle decision is law. Why are you putting these questions to me?”

Jeebleh was on his feet, shaking. He heard a bell ringing faintly somewhere, then saw suspicious movements outside, among the trees. Was he imagining things? Could there be snipers at the ready waiting for him, men like Kaahin, lying flat on their chests, preparing to shoot? This talk about Soviet instructors drilling obedience into their students’ heads reminded him of his English teacher Miss Bradley, who was fond of repeating, “Memory is a bugger!” Now he watched the garden, imagining that it was crawling with armed men of dubious loyalties, military types working on commissions, on the completion of deadly assignments. He could get killed, and no one would know, for he hadn’t told anyone he was coming here.

Caloosha asked, “What’s brought you here?”

“Deaths, lies!”

“I haven’t killed anyone,” Caloosha said.

Jeebleh remembered his earlier encounter with the Kathakali dancer, who asked the murderers in the crowd to separate themselves from the innocent. “Have I accused you of being a murderer?” he said.

“You can’t pin anyone’s death on me!”

Yet Caloosha had been accused of murder, when he was young, hadn’t he? His own mother had suspected him of murdering her husband, his stepfather. But she didn’t have the evidence. Moreover, there were other murders that could be pinned on him, once the International Criminal Court charged Somalia’s warlords and their associates with crimes against humanity.

Caloosha had risen out of his chair. Now he was threatening: “Watch out!”

“Your loyalties are despicable.”

“I’m warning you!”

Jeebleh forced himself to concentrate on the pale moons of his own fingernails, to focus on the evenness of the lunar shapes. Was he showing signs of malnutrition? Peace and compromise both had gone out the window, and the two of them were on a warpath. So be it. “What were you doing in the family home of the girl who’s now your kept woman?” he asked.

“I’ve never robbed corpses, like someone else I know!”

“What are you talking about?”

“I bet Bile hasn’t told you!”

“Af-Laawe spoke of the alleged crime, all right.”

“And did Bile own up to this crime when you met him?”

“We didn’t get around to talking about alleged crimes, Bile and I.”

“Ask him why he blacked out for a good three days.” Caloosha had regained some of his composure. Both of them sat down again. “Ask him if he killed and then slept it all off, woke up, and then robbed. Or whether the robbing came first, and the killing later. We have three unaccounted-for days, three whole days. We know when he ran out, a free man, and we know when Dajaal picked him up, lost to the world. My junior half brother killed, robbed, and then slept it off!”

“Bile wouldn’t lower himself to such a base level.”

Caloosha applauded with an informed sarcasm, only he didn’t clap with his palms, but instead knocked his fingernails together, in jest.

“Do you continue to drink the blood of your foes?” Jeebleh asked.

Caloosha had a gory sense of humor. “Maybe that’s why I’ve been sick lately,” he said, “suffering, as I do, from severe inflammation of my joints and from an abundance of uric acid in my own blood.” Then he added, “You make me sick.”

Jeebleh didn’t know what to make of Caloosha’s behavior, and he got to his feet, unsure where to go or what to say. He paced back and forth, then placed his foot on a stool. They had both gone too far, and it was his turn to compromise, if necessary, to make amends. He put on his professional act: “In the pressure cooker of a civil war, in which the sides at war have been intimates, everyone exaggerates. Okay? And when a society has lost its general sense of direction and, along with it, its self-respect, then every individual is on his or her own, miserably alone. Like ants with no hierarchy or order. Okay? I suggest we forget whatever either of us has said in anger. Okay?”

“I get your point!” Caloosha replied.

They were silent for a long while, and a semblance of calmness returned. Caloosha was where Jeebleh wanted him to be, in an amiable mood. “I am here to make peace,” Jeebleh said. “Okay? The past is not here, the present is war, so we must think about the future and marry it to peace. You get me?”

“I get you.”

Jeebleh hoped that it wasn’t too late in the day for him to introduce the subject that had brought him to Caloosha in the first place. He thought cautiously and elaborated the question in his head. Then he straightened his back, massaged it, and yawned. “Have you seen Faahiye lately?” he said.

Jeebleh talked about Faahiye when he actually wanted to talk about Raasta, and her disappearance. Because the girl’s father was as safe a topic as he could come up with at short notice.

“He came to see me the other day, to say hi.”

“Alone?”

“Af-Laawe brought him along.”

“When was this?” Jeebleh asked.

“I can’t recall.”

“What about my mother’s housekeeper?”

“What about her?”

“Could you tell me how I can reach her? I’ll do so without imposing on you.”

“It is possible,” Caloosha said, “that like Faahiye, your mother’s housekeeper went to a refugee camp in Mombasa. I’ll see what I can do, and get back to you when I have news of them.”

How convenient: a refugee camp in Mombasa!

“What about Raasta and Makka?”

Caloosha gave the question serious thought before responding. “Faahiye assured me, when I asked him, that he knew nothing about his daughter’s whereabouts. You know that the girl’s parents had separated before her disappearance?”

“I would like to see Faahiye.”

“If he is in the country, you will,” Caloosha vowed.

“And my late mother’s housekeeper?”

“If she hasn’t left for Mombasa, you will.”

They exchanged a few pleasantries, and Jeebleh helped himself to another cup of coffee, and then asked if Kaahin could take him back to his hotel, on foot. And of course, he would think about the offer to move in with Caloosha, thank you most kindly.

11

BACK IN HIS HOTEL, JEEBLEH ARRANGED TO PHONE BILE. WHEN THEY spoke, they agreed to meet, and Bile promised to send Dajaal to fetch him. Jeebleh was eager to talk, because Af-Laawe’s and Caloosha’s innuendos were beginning to bother him.

As he waited for Dajaal, Jeebleh replayed in his mind the two encounters — with Af-Laawe his first day, and Caloosha today — and his expression clouded over as he sadly contemplated how difficult it might be to discredit the accusations. Even though he did not think there was any truth to their insinuations, he did not want to dismiss them out of hand. It was possible that they were trying to trick him away from the direction in which he ought to be moving. And what better way to achieve their devious ends than to introduce such hard-to-challenge charges against Bile’s integrity? Jeebleh didn’t wish to rely only on his gut feeling: he wanted to hear his friend’s side of the story too.

There was much ground to be covered. But before getting to what interested him, or asking Bile to refute the allegations or own up to them, Jeebleh decided that he would inform him about his own activities so far. He would tell him about being shadowed and then approached by the military types who had escorted him to Caloosha’s villa, and how the place had crawled with suspicious movements, how he felt the armed men were out to intimidate him and make him stop asking questions about Raasta.

Once Jeebleh and Bile were together, they were anxious to get talking before Bile was called away on some emergency or another. They spoke fast, their words now merging and working well together, now jarring and making no sense at all.

It fell to Jeebleh to make coffee for himself and tea for Bile, and to serve them both. It fell to him too to ask the appropriate questions so that his friend might build a bridge between his elusive past and the murky present in which they found themselves now.

“What was your first day of freedom like?”

“I had a harrowing experience of it,” Bile responded readily, prepared for this question, “because fighting framed my life then in ways I’ll never be able to communicate well to others not familiar with the circumstances.” The stress on his face was evident. “My first day as a free man proved to be the most frightening day in my entire life.”

“Why?”

“As prisoners, we were entirely cut off. We had no idea what was happening outside our cells. We had no idea that the Tyrant had fled the city. Someone, Lord knows who, opened the prison gates, someone else the gates of the city’s madhouses, someone else the gates of the zoo. So you had humans, some mad and some not, you had animals of every shape, size, and description, all of them on the run. And running alongside them, or in the opposite direction away from them, you had the looters, and the frightened families fleeing. You had thousands of political detainees, and hardened criminals in the tens of thousands. The lions, the zebras, the hyenas, the zoo camel with its two humps — every single creature on the run. You couldn’t tell who was fleeing from whom and who was chasing whom. Left to myself, I would’ve stayed on in my prison quarters, where I might have felt safer.”

“How did you know the gates were open?”

“Several hours after they were opened, a handful of vigilantes burst into our wing of the jail,” Bile replied, “and went from cell to cell, vowing to kill all the prominent politicians from the opposite clan family. The vigilantes had a dust-laden accent — they must have been recruited from the nomadic hamlets north of Balcad town. I was threatened with death because I tried to intervene, using the nationalist rhetoric of the sixties and seventies. They told me to leave, but I couldn’t, because I had a problem getting up. But they didn’t hack me to pieces with a machete. In the end, I left my cell, my home for so many of my prison years, when it was safer to do so.”

Jeebleh poured more tea into Bile’s cup. And looking outside, he saw the sky wearing the clearest of blue and the sun a very bright smile.

Bile continued: “The streets were filled to bursting with the mad, the political detainees just released, the criminals with all kinds of murderous records, and the animals from the zoo. The hard-hearted military types were busy looting the banks and city coffers. The clan militias recruited from the nomadic encampments were looking for city women to rape, and for properties to plunder and cart away in the trucks they had appropriated. The city, the whole country, was pure chaos. The advancing morning melted into high noon before I knew it. I was told of hungry hyenas scavenging in the city center, of lions on the prowl in school dormitories, and of elephants running amok in supermarkets! An unannounced eclipse at dawn: that was what it felt like, the first morning of my freedom.”

A heart-wrenching noise erupted outside. They both looked up. Bile explained that vultures were making this ungodly din on the roof of a nearby building, fighting over a carcass.

Neither spoke for a good while.

“What bothered me most was that I couldn’t tell the bad guys from the good guys,” Bile went on. “After all — not that I had any trust in them — those in uniform, whether they were on the payrolls of the National Army or the police, were all busy looting too. I felt that before long the army and the police would fragment into splinter groups along clan lines. So I moved about in a state of utter confusion.

“I was hungry, frightened, and I didn’t know where I was headed. I didn’t want to go to Caloosha. I couldn’t care less if he was dead or alive. But I wanted to get in touch with Shanta. I had no idea where she was, if she was in danger, or if she had fled the city. It was a nightmare from which, given the choice, I might not have wanted to awaken.

“On one occasion, while moving around, I remember coming up to a madman who took one look at me and kept out of my way — maybe he thought that I was madder than he. Of course, I wasn’t mad in my own mind, because I was overwhelmed with embarrassment at the figure I must have cut — something the mad seldom feel. You see, I wasn’t in a prisoner’s uniform. I was in rags, so dirty not even a beggar would put them on. Part of me wanted to be touched, seen and helped, the other part wanted to hide my eyes, ostrichlike, in the sand of my imagining. In short, I felt suicidal.”

“So what did you do?”

“If twenty years in jail had taught me anything,” he said, “it was never to trust in luck. In any case, I ran into trouble, right where Lazaretto Road meets Stadium Road, when I was accosted by a group of men, common criminals by the look and sound of them. They chased me. I ran faster than they, and had just turned a corner when I saw a group of thugs roaming the area farther on. Luckily I was at a quiet cul de sac, where a gate opened. A boy in his early teens, dressed in sneakers, khaki shorts, and a safari hat, as if ready for a picnic, came out and looked this way and that. He retreated into the house in terrific haste. I waited. Then a big four-wheel-drive with maybe a dozen passengers of all ages, from grandparents to grandchildren, came out, the boy holding the gate open. When the vehicle had reversed out, he pulled the gate shut and got in, and the vehicle sped away. I forced the gate open — it needed only a decisive push — and went in, closing it behind me securely.

“No sooner had I taken my second step than I saw a very fierce dog waiting for me. It was medium-sized, with a short black coat, most likely a Doberman. It was growling and barking. I acted as though I was a friend. But when I moved, the dog bared its teeth and continued barking at me more fiercely than before. I snapped my fingers, tried what I could to make the dog into a friend, but it still barked whenever I moved. It didn’t attack me, though, and eventually I got to a door, and into the kitchen. I bolted myself inside.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I marked time.”

“Doing what?”

“I made myself coffee,” Bile said. “I walked around in the house, marked out my territory, after I had made sure no one else was there. I ventured up to where the bedrooms were, and disconnected the alarm. Being able to achieve this most difficult of feats helped me conquer my fear. I showered, found a wardrobe. The choices were so many. I felt like a child dressing for a birthday party. In the end, I chose a pair of jeans and a pressed shirt. By this time, I had ceased to think of myself as an intruder, and felt like the owner of the house — at least I moved about like I was. It was the kind of house I might have owned or lived in, given the chance.”

“And then?”

“I thought of winning the dog’s trust. I opened the front door and it came at me, growling. But it wasn’t as fierce as before, maybe because I had on its master’s clothes. The dog and I stood there uneasily, sizing each other up. Then I played with it, making it go fetch a ball. An hour and a half of this, and the dog and I became friends of a kind. And it began to follow me everywhere I went, and jumped into the Volkswagen Beetle in the carport when I inspected it, trying to see if it would start.

“I went into the house once I was exhausted from playing with the dog. And when the silence got to me, I switched on the radio to listen to the BBC news and, as I did so, ate some Parmesan cheese of stupendous pedigree. I had coffee and more coffee, and then more Parmesan. Heaven was coffee with Parmesan. I tasted the joy of life in the coffee I drank, and in the Parmesan I ate.”

Bile had a ball of a time, living it up. He hadn’t a care in the world, like someone living on borrowed time, and enjoying every instant of it. He ate cheese or what fruit there was, because he couldn’t bring himself to cook a meal. And because there was not a single book in the entire house, except for school texts in Italian and Somali, he listened to the radio and exercised his leg, which was still giving him a bit of trouble. With plenty of time on his hands, he decided to use it profitably: he taught himself to read and write Somali, which was given an official orthography only in 1972, while he was in prison. And when he tired of learning to read and write, or of listening to the radio or playing with the dog, he went to the telephone and pressed the redial button in hope of speaking to a human voice. The line was either busy or the phone was not functioning, he couldn’t tell.

He wished then that he were one in a crowd, where he could touch and be touched. “That was what I wanted,” he said. “I had lived in total isolation for years, and hadn’t touched or been touched. I envied the mad, naively thinking that they never feel lonely, as their heads are full of talk and of other people’s memories. I envied the madman who could think of himself as a crowd, and behave any way he liked!”

“And then?”

“I felt depressed, miserable, and lonely. I slept for who knows how long, and woke up a new man. My memory, which I thought had gone dead on me, had been stirred into action, selectively remembering some of the things I had seen and done. I couldn’t remember what I had done between when I saw the fierce dog and made myself several cups of espresso and walked about the house alone, marking out the territory as though it was mine, and when I decided to think of myself as a free man. Then I realized I didn’t have to hide in one of the city’s shadowy corners, or reinvent myself by changing the history of my loyalties. It was then that I finally decided to celebrate my freedom!”

“How did you do that?”

“I was going to go out.”

If Jeebleh didn’t ask pointed questions to get Bile to devote a few minutes to answering Af-Laawe’s and Caloosha’s allegations about murdering and stealing, it was because he didn’t wish to interrupt the flow of the narrative. He was sure they would have the opportunity to talk about this and many other subjects too. “And?”

“It was when I was looking for some clothes to carry away for my immediate use that I stumbled on a duffel bag full of money, in large denominations, in cash and ready to go! The amount was staggeringly high, close to a million U.S. dollars. It was there all along, only I hadn’t seen it.”

Jeebleh stared at the scar on Bile’s forehead. An inch long, and pale, no bigger than a caterpillar that would mutate into a butterfly. He stared at it, because he sensed it moving. Now he said, “What did you do?”

“I went to sleep,” Bile said.

“But what on earth for?”

“Not being a thief, and not wanting to tempt fate,” Bile explained, “I decided I no longer had any reason to hurry. I was determined to take my time and decide what to do with the money, whether to appropriate it, or just leave it where I found it.

“But I became afraid of the looters, whom I knew to be stronger than I, and who I knew would come. If I was clear in my mind about one thing, it was that I should ultimately hand the money over to the government. I hadn’t thought about what I might do in the absence of a reconstituted national government.”

He paused, helped himself to more tea, and then went on: “I’m not a religious person, but for the first time in years I thought about God and His purpose in me. I also thought about a couple of small things I might use the money for. Then Plotinus came to me. And I thought about peace, about the misery and poverty of our people, and how, if the money were mine and I used it judiciously, even a small sum could help a lot of people.”

“You didn’t think the owners might return?”

“I stayed on in the house with the money,” he said. “I was in no hurry — remember, I wasn’t a thief. And when I slept — and I slept for a very, very long time, almost three days I should think — I dreamt at one point that I was setting very, very many small things right. Then I came to, because I heard a god-awful noise!”

“What?”

“The dog was barking and barking.”

“When would this have been?” Jeebleh asked.

“At dawn, I cannot be certain which day it was, my first intimation of danger was at more or less the same time as the muezzin’s call. The barking, interspersed with the eerie quiet of the hour, struck fear into my heart. I thought of running away, and there was a great deal of sense in that. But I decided to sit it out. I waited and waited. No one came, and the dog stopped barking. I resolved to take the money, and use it for other people!”

“And you left?”

“In search of Shanta.”

“Had you any inkling where she might be?”

“No.”

“Had things calmed down by then?”

“Not much,” Bile said. “But it made sense to take the car in the carport, despite the moral question — although this irked me. Would I be stealing if I took a million dollars stashed in a duffel bag ready to go, from the house of people who had looted the coffers of the state before its final collapse? Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if I used the embezzled funds to set up a charitable refuge? We could argue about these moral issues at length. In the end, thief or no thief, I said to hell with it, took the car, and quit the house.”

“And the dog?”

“Where would I take the dog?”

“Fair enough. You drove off,” Jeebleh said, “alone.”

“In Somalia the civil war then was language,” Bile said, “only I didn’t speak the new language. At one point, a couple of armed men flagged me down, and one of them asked, ‘Yaad tahay?’ I hadn’t realized that the old way of answering the question ‘Who are you?’ was no longer valid. Now the answer universally given to ‘Who are you?’ referred to the identity of your clan family, your blood identity! I found the correct responses in the flourish of the tongue, found them in the fresh idiom, the new argot. I was all right. I was a good mimic, able to speak in the correct Somali accent, nodding when my questioner mentioned the right acronym. The men who flagged me down had in their gaze the shine of well-fed guard dogs. What’s more, their four-wheel-drive vehicle was loaded, because they had just robbed the Central Bank.”

“So they let you proceed?”

“With a warning, after I spoke the acronym of the period,” Bile said, head down, as if embarrassed to have done so.

“What was the acronym of the period?”

“The initial letters of the clan-based militia movement that ran the Tyrant out of the city.”

“They just let you go?”

“They suggested that I take care. I gathered from this that it would be unwise to ask if they knew where I might find Caloosha. I didn’t think it likely that they would lead me to Shanta.”

Bile’s hands were beginning to resemble those of a baby, clutched tightly into fists. Maybe he was wishing he had done something cavalier by challenging the looters.

Bile continued, “I had barely gone a kilometer when a pack of knife-wielding urchins flagged me down. I was trying to appease them, when my prayer was answered: a man in uniform, armed but not looting, came driving by. He asked if there was a problem. The youths fled. I introduced myself to the gentleman, who told me his name: Dajaal. Taken aback, at first I assumed it was an alias, some sort of nom de guerre. When it became obvious that I could trust him, I told him that I wanted to get in touch with a sister of mine, and gave him some spiel, the gist of which was that I had no idea how to reach her. It was my good fortune that he knew my name, knew Shanta, and knew where she lived. He and I belonged to the same family — he said so right away, as if to assure me that I could trust him. That didn’t matter to me as much as it mattered to him. What mattered to me was to find Shanta, and I said so. He told me to follow him, but for obvious reasons this didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to get rid of the Volkswagen, I wanted to have no associations with the house I had gotten it from, or the family it had belonged to. So I got into his car and felt safe in his hands.

“Ours was the only car on the road in that part of the city, but there were pedestrians everywhere — at crossroads, ahead of us, behind us. Many were entering houses empty-handed and emerging with their loot. At one point, Dajaal nearly ran over a man carrying what appeared to be a very heavy load. I got out of the car and helped the man gather his scattered loot. I had half expected to find the roads blocked with checkpoints, and curiously, they weren’t. I was relieved also that Dajaal hadn’t inquired about the contents of my duffel bag!”

Bile learned from Dajaal that Shanta had married Faahiye, who was nearly twenty-five years her senior, and that she was heavily pregnant at forty-three.

“I had thought that she was past childbearing age, and reasoned aloud that if this was her first, I would have to prepare, for such a pregnancy might bring along its fair share of problems. ‘A miracle baby, then?’ Dajaal said.”

As it turned out, by the time Bile was led to her, Shanta was in labor and in great pain. There were no doctors around, and no possibility of getting her to a hospital. Bile had to break the traditional medical code of conduct and help his younger sister in her hour of labor.

“Never mind the medical or traditional code, which I disregarded,” Bile said, “it gave me great joy to deliver a lovely dreadlocked miracle baby into the world!”

“And then?”

The phone rang, and Jeebleh and Bile looked at each other. “I’m afraid that installment will have to wait,” Bile said, and went to answer.

12

JEEBLEH DREAMT THAT HE WAS A CRAB. HE HAD GONE PAST THE LARVAL phase of transparency but gotten stuck in the stage of growing legs. His carapace was not broad enough, and his legs were deformed. He couldn’t scuttle around as crabs do, he could only move slowly and laboriously. A distant cousin of the spider crab, he looked forward to waiting in thorny flowers for prey to pounce on. A pity that no victim came within the reach of his claws.

When he woke, he felt the urge to take a dip in the ocean. He missed the delicate touch of its saltiness, and remembered how much he enjoyed swimming and then going for long walks, the sandy beach stretching ahead of him and to his back, the air clean, the water as blue as the sky, and as clear. He and Bile would spend much of their slack time on a café terrace facing the ocean.

He decided to go for a swim before breakfast, and found himself walking sideways. At first, he was a little amused, but when he saw some youths staring at him in shock, he stopped walking altogether. He paused for a long while, closing his eyes and taking deep breaths, concentrating his mind on what he would do next. Eventually he moved, but only after he felt he could walk straight.

He was wearing a sarong that he had brought from New York — a present from his wife — a Yankees T-shirt, and under the sarong, a pair of swimming trunks. Around his shoulders was a towel. For shoes he had a cheap pair of Chinese-made flip-flops, the only item he had purchased in Mogadiscio since his arrival, from a vendor at the hotel. When he had inquired at the reception desk about going to the ocean for a swim, the man at the reception desk seemed amused, maybe because of Jeebleh’s attire. The man told him that the beach was no more than a five minutes’ walk away. He was to go east, and he would soon come to it.

The water stretched endlessly before him. He stared at its immensity, and had a moment of recollection. He was in his early teens, with Bile, and the two were escaping from Caloosha. In his memory, the ocean was a place of refuge, because Caloosha had never learned to swim, despite his having been in Mogadiscio for much of his life. When the memory faded, Jeebleh looked this way and that, and noted that the beach was deserted. He took off his sarong, T-shirt, and towel, and placed them under a stone, to make sure he would find them later.

After he had been in the shallow water only a few minutes, it occurred to him that it might not be worth risking his life for a dip in the ocean. Not that he was afraid of the surf or of sharks. He saw three men on the beach looking in his direction. He suspected that one of them was armed; he seemed to have a shiny revolverlike weapon in his grip. He guessed the man could easily have taken a potshot at him.

Who were they? He reckoned they were not from one or the other clan-based militia, for they seemed to be better disciplined than those armed thugs who killed for a bit of sport. For all he knew, they were there on instructions from Caloosha, to shadow and report on his movements. But would they harm him or protect him? It bothered him that he had no way of knowing. He doubted that Dajaal had the wherewithal to arrange such a security detail at Bile’s behest. Besides, Dajaal’s authority did not stretch to the north of the city, where Jeebleh was having his swim.

He swam farther and farther out and floated. He didn’t want to expose himself to sharks. He wasn’t sure what to do next — stay where he was, go out farther, or get out.

HE WAS AN EXCELLENT SWIMMER. HIS TECHNIQUE IMPROVED THE INSTANT HE exiled all worries of death from his mind. His breaststroke was as good as a competitive swimmer’s, his butterfly superbly rhythmic, and his crawl extraordinarily fast. When the water proved rough, he resorted to breaststroke. When it was calm, he rested, floating. He lay on his back, contemplating the blue sky, thinking.

He recalled sitting in an apartment in Queens with his wife and daughters, and watching the main event on television: Marines in combat gear, and cameras flashing as photographers took pictures of the Americans alighting from their amphibious craft. In a moment, several of the Marines, appearing proud, would be interviewed by one of the most famous anchormen in America. Jeebleh’s wife turned to him to ask whether the Marines knew what doing “God’s work” meant in a country like Somalia.

It was from the ocean that all the major invasions of the Somali peninsula had come. The Arabs, and after them the Persians, and after the Persians the Portuguese, and after the Portuguese the French, the British, and the Italians, and later the Russians, and most recently the Americans — here, Jeebleh remembered how the U.S. intervention to feed the starving Somalis became an invasion of a kind, hence the term “intravasion,” frequently used at the time. In any case, all these foreigners, well-meaning or not, came from the ocean. The invaders might be pilgrims bearing gifts, or boys dispatched to do “God’s work”; the American in charge of the U.S. “intravasion” would be described in the reputable Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1994 as the putative “Head of the State of Somalia.”

Jeebleh stayed in the water for an hour. He lay afloat, the sky unfailingly above him, the warm water below. These were his only points of reference. And in the farthest reaches of the sky, he saw an eagle, majestically alone and riding the heavens’ sail, and around it the clouds paying homage. He sensed, even from such a distance, the determination in every feather — a bird in regal flight. What elegance!

Doing the breaststroke now, to view ahead of himself, he saw no sign of the three men. Were they gone? Did they have nothing to do with him? Was he being paranoid? Or were they hiding behind the bushes, ready to pounce? He came out of the water cautiously and walked, edging along the sea wall, faster and faster, because he was now truly afraid. Then all of a sudden he spotted one of the gunmen, who looked away, embarrassed. It was Kaahin.

The men kept their discreet distance, but still following him, until he was safely within view of the hotel gate. And when he turned, just before going in, he saw that they were no longer there.

HE SENSED SOMETHING WRONG THE MOMENT HE GOT TO THE GATE, HIS shadow as short as a set of manacles fitted around his ankles. He stamped his feet on the paved driveway to rid them of the fine sand that clung to them, and while doing so, greeted the sentries at the gate. One of them kept making signs. Not adept at sign language, Jeebleh had difficulty following the meaning. The man kept doing funny things with his tongue. What on earth was he trying to communicate? Jeebleh noticed a group of elderly men crouched in a dusty huddle, whispering to one another. These must be his clansmen. The pedestrian door, carved out of the bigger gate, was opened for him, and he walked through.

At the reception desk, he was given a thick parcel. He broke the seal and unwrapped the package, and inside found a mobile phone with a manual in Arabic — presumably it had been imported from Abu Dhabi, where most Mogadiscians got their high-tech stuff. An attached note advised him, in Italian, of the numbers that had been fed into the phone’s memory. A P.S., in Bile’s hand, told him not to worry about the bills.

Then the same receptionist gave him an envelope. This was thin and contained a one-page message in Somali, written on lined paper torn out of a child’s exercise book. At first he thought that a child had penned it — an obviously shaky hand, some of the letters small, others large. At the bottom of the message were six thumbprint signatures and three printed names, difficult to decipher. His hand trembled as he held it, and he thought of it as a souvenir that would benefit from being framed — ideally on the walls of an adult literacy class. The message informed him that his clan elders wanted to discuss with him matters of family importance.

He took his time showering, then tried to make the mobile phone work. Being inexperienced, he pressed buttons at random and inaccurately, and got cut off or reached busy signals or wrong numbers. Just when he thought he had succeeded, Bile’s number was off his screen.

He felt it was time for his Yemeni coffee. Downstairs, he asked a runner to get him a pot of coffee and to prepare several pots of tea, milk, lots and lots of biscuits, and half a kilo of sugar, and to bring these to his table. When the runner returned, he told a bellboy to show the clan elders in.

THE MEN FORMED A LINE AND GREETED JEEBLEH ONE AT A TIME, EACH OF them respectfully taking his hand in both of theirs. Then they sat down at a table, three to the right of him, six to his left, he at the head. Before anyone uttered a word beyond the greetings, Jeebleh pointed to the nine teapots, one for each of them, the biscuits still wrapped, and the bowls filled to the brim with sugar. He suggested they help themselves.

They got down to the business of pouring out their tea with the clumsiness of four-year-olds. And even though their cups were full, they poured milk, then added several spoonfuls of sugar, so that the tea spilled over the sides. They did this with such devotion you might have thought they would depart as soon as each had attended to his sweet tooth. The table was soon as messy as a toddler’s birthday party would have made it. The crackling of biscuit wrappings mixed with the loud chorus of tea slurping. A host of flies arrived to feast on the sugary surfaces of cups and saucers.

The first elder to speak had biscuit crumbs on his chin and a bit of sugar on his cheek. He was of small build and looked healthy for his age. He explained that he and several other elders had come previously to greet and welcome Jeebleh, but they were informed that he had gone out. “Now we’re very pleased to return with a different lot of elders who’ve shown interest in meeting our son, and to welcome him back into the bosom of his immediate clan.” The old man requested that each of the other elders speak, but confine their remarks to a few words, because, he said, “your son is a very busy man and doesn’t have a lot of time to waste.” After they had done so, he invited each of them to recite from the Koran, in praise of Allah, who had brought their son back from “his worldly wanderings.” Their lips astir and their voices low, each man mouthed a few verses.

Jeebleh bowed to each of them in turn, greeting them with a ritual nod, but said nothing. Then he poured himself more coffee and sipped at it leisurely. One of the men passed him the sugar bowl. He nodded his thanks as he took the proffered bowl, and watched the consternation on the men’s faces as he put it aside without helping himself. Why was he drinking his coffee bitter, with so much sweetness available?

The spokesman of the elders now discussed Jeebleh’s importance and the positive, commendable role he could play in the politics of the clan. Jeebleh lapsed into a private mood, a man in his own space. He did his utmost not to display unease at the thought of privileging blood over ideology. The idea of nine self-appointed clansmen making a claim on him was anathema. Of course, he meant not to anger them unnecessarily. But he changed his mind when the spokesman alluded to his mother without mentioning his father. “As it happens, we’re from your mother’s side of the bah!”

By invoking his mother’s name, not his father’s, the men from his mother’s subclan were explicitly distancing themselves from his father, the gambler. The elders failed to mention that they had blamed his mother for her husband’s wild ways, accusing her of driving him first to gambling and then to the bottle, when this wasn’t the case, according to his mother’s version. Some of these very men may have been present when family members had resolved to deny her a hearing — one of them was for sure, the especially ancien-looking sort with the thick glasses, whom Jeebleh thought of as FourEyes. So where was the clan when Jeebleh’s mother sang her sorrow, a single mother raising him, and later a widow isolated from the subclan? Where were these men then? The first time a member of his subclan ever visited him was when he returned from Italy, with a university degree. When he incurred the Dictator’s wrath and for his pains was thrown into prison and sentenced to death, they had all deserted him, hadn’t they? He knew that clan elders were self-serving men, high on selective memory and devoid of dignity.

“I am insulted by the way you’ve formulated my identity,” Jeebleh said. “Why do I feel I am being insulted? Why do you continue referring to me as the son of my mother without ever bothering to mention my father by name? Don’t I have a father? Am I illegitimate? We know what he was like and what kind of man he was, but still, he was my father and I bear his name, not my mother’s! How dare you address me in a way that questions my being the legitimate son of my own father?”

The gathering was thrown into a state of noisy confusion, as all the elders tried to assure him that they did not mean to insult him, or to offend his parents’ memories. He was elated that their cynical ploy had worked to his advantage, remembering how, earlier, he had restrained himself from losing his temper with Caloosha. The elders were now too shocked to speak. He had them where he wanted them.

“Why have you come, then?” he asked the bespectacled man to his right, and not the spokesman, farther to his left, who, rendered speechless, covered his mouth with his hand. The men’s evasive looks now converged on the face of the spokesman. He removed his hand from his mouth and shook his head regretfully: he was not going to speak, either on his own behalf or on anyone else’s.

There was vigor in his voice when FourEyes now spoke. He came to the point: “Unlike other bahs of the clan, ours hasn’t been able to raise a strong fighting militia. We do not have sufficient funds to take our rightful place among the subclans equal in number to or even smaller than ours. We’ve come to appeal to you for money so we may repair our only two battlewagons.”

Jeebleh addressed himself to the gathering: “I’m busy with other concerns, and as you can imagine, I’ve not brought along with me more cash than I need for my daily expenses. So I suggest you wait until I return home and consult my wife and daughters, and I’ll come back to you with my response.”

There was absolute silence as the meaning of Jeebleh’s words registered with the elders. Then, as if on cue, the mobile phone on Jeebleh’s lap squealed. He answered it and told the gathering, “This is an important call, and I must take it in private. Please forgive me.” And he walked away.

“Are we to wait for you?” FourEyes called after him.

“You needn’t,” Jeebleh answered. “I’ll be in touch!”

The men argued among themselves, some suggesting that they should wait, others insisting that the earlier command to wait had been addressed to the caller. When he walked farther away, and they heard him ask one of the runners to show them out, they said in a chorus, “This is an insult!”

Jeebleh waved to them from the reception area, and shouted: “Go well!” And before they had a chance to say anything, he himself was gone.

AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER, JEEBLEH SAT IN THE HOTEL COURTYARD AND took note, with alarm, of three gunmen walking past the sentry at the gate without being stopped. The hotel runners entertained the three with friendly banter. Even so, Jeebleh was very conscious of the mood palpably changing. And when he called to one of the runners, asking what the gunmen were doing on the grounds of the hotel, the youth just made “Search me” gestures. The sun was burning hot, the sand seemed agitated, and the air unhealthy.

Jeebleh’s wandering gaze fell on a boy in a fancy cowboy hat and jeans, ruthlessly hitting an Alsatian with a stick. He turned to the young man at the next table and asked why the gun-carrying militiamen had been allowed in, and why no one was stopping the boy from abusing the dog. “Maybe the gunmen are the boy’s bodyguards?” the young man mused.

“Who does the Alsatian belong to?”

“I don’t know.”

The pregnant dog was writhing in agony, and actively giving birth. There was something odd about the clothes of the boy, and something odder still about a pure-bred Alsatian in today’s Mogadiscio. From another table, Jeebleh overheard a likely explanation: that the dog had once belonged to an Englishman, formerly of the BBC African Service, who had been seconded to the city by UNOSOM. But why had he abandoned his pampered pet to fend for herself, knowing she might fall prey to packs of bush dogs more feral than even the fiercest Alsatian? Or be beaten to death by Somalis not given to being friendly when it came to dogs? What madness could have compelled him to leave her behind?

Jeebleh remembered how, when he was small, he had tried to stop Caloosha and his friends from molesting a dog. He had been beaten harshly himself for his impudence. (Many years later, he learned that one of the boys had met the fate he deserved: he died from rabies.)

Jeebleh took courage, and found his tongue. He shouted, warning the boy to stop abusing the dog or he would deal with him. At the sound of the raised voice, the guns of the militiamen were trained on him.

He stood up and stormed over to the boy and took him by the scruff of his pampered neck. The boy was so shaken that he choked on his scream, issuing none audibly. “If this spoiled brat disturbs this dog again,” Jeebleh shouted, so everybody could hear, “I’ll become violent and punish him.” The dog looked terribly frightened, and Jeebleh, for his part, felt overwhelmed. But when he snatched the stick from the boy, the dog began to relax. Jeebleh said, “When you hurt the dog, I hurt.”

Now the Alsatian came closer to Jeebleh, and finding her tongue, favored his extended hand with a lick. Jeebleh crouched by the dog, touching her coarse coat, stroking her gently. This provoked a ripple of disapproval across the crowd that had now gathered to watch. Whatever they might think, Jeebleh and the dog looked at each other for a long while, and he discovered her intelligence in the steady confidence in her eyes. Then the dog, racked with birth pangs, went even closer to Jeebleh, who encouraged her to keep pushing. Someone in the crowd commented favorably on his kind gesture: showing mercy to a dog in labor. Someone else said that what he had done was un-Islamic; as a Muslim, he was supposed to avoid coming into physical contact with dogs.

When Jeebleh next looked around, the armed youths were no longer aiming their guns at him. As a matter of fact, they weren’t even there. Perhaps they had sensed that their threatening posture was not acceptable anymore and had slunk away.

He was now in an upbeat mood, and remained close by until the dog, having given birth, bit off the umbilical cords. He admired the compact beauty of the litter: puppies full of stir, half Alsatian, half bush dog, of exquisite grace. He wished someone with a home thereabouts would keep them and look after them. He found a quiet corner for the family, and took off his jacket and covered the puppies with it.

Walking away, he felt good, proud of what he had done, despite the shock on people’s faces. As he moved toward them, a path opened before him, many shunning him because they did not wish to make any physical contact with a man who had touched and been licked by a dog. Customarily, Somalis who came into contact with dogs would cleanse themselves ritually, in obedience to the Islamic code of self-purification. He did not care a sick dog’s snuffle if anyone now shunned bodily contact with him.

As he walked past one knot of bystanders, he heard a whisper: “What manner of man chases away the elders of his clan, and in the same afternoon risks his life to save a bitch?”

The fact that many people had missed out on love because of the continued strife, Jeebleh thought, did not mean that one should stand by and do nothing or allow further cruelty to be meted out to animals or humans.

13

THE SUN SHONE BRIGHTLY, THE NOON HIGH ON ITS DIAL.

His expression sullen, Jeebleh squinted up at Af-Laawe, who towered above him where he sat. Because Af-Laawe was a friend and an associate of Caloosha’s, Jeebleh didn’t feel he could go to him for help, or share with him his concerns. But now that he was friendless and felt ostracized by the hotel staff — not so much for his kindness to the Alsatian as for his rude sendoff of the clan elders — he was wondering whether to seek out Af-Laawe, obviously a man with a murky history. Maybe things would work out well in the end. As he rose to take Af-Laawe’s hand, Jeebleh proposed a walk in the neighborhood.

“A walk and a talk will do you good,” Af-Laawe agreed.

Conscious of the hostility directed at him from all around, Jeebleh noted that even Bucktooth, the friendliest of the sentries, who had welcomed him with enthusiasm earlier, averted his visibly disturbed gaze. To make a point, though, he greeted Af-Laawe by name. There were rough edges to things, and Jeebleh was more aware of them because of the dirty politics of the place, and this was weighing down on his mind.

He who alienates his clan family is dead, he thought, as he followed Af-Laawe out of his hotel grounds into the derelict streets lined with vandalized buildings. Parting with his clansmen, leaving the hotel — these were as easily done as throwing out a rotten banana when you were well fed. Besides, it was just as well that it had happened the way it did. A confrontation between him and the clan elders over his political loyalties was bound to happen sooner or later, and he was relieved that it had occurred when it had — a few days into his visit. He would move out of the hotel at the first opportunity, and take up Bile’s offer to share the apartment with him for a few days. He had a lot to do: locate his mother’s housekeeper, and make sure that his mother had found peace, that her soul was laid to rest; give a hand in recovering Raasta and her companion from their captors; and recruit Dajaal to exact vengeance on Caloosha.

AF-LAAWE LED JEEBLEH IN THE DIRECTION OF VILLAGGIO ARABO, NAMED FOR the Yemeni community who had formed the majority in the district during his youth. He remembered it as a lively quarter, very cosmopolitan, its alleyways infused with spicy fragrances — the Yemeni kitchen was one of Jeebleh’s favorites. He didn’t need to ask what had become of the community: virtually all, he knew, had fled the city in the earlier weeks of the civil war, when the dust-laden pastoralists recruited into StrongmanNorth’s armed militia turned on them, raping their women and plundering their wealth.

In the streets where Jeebleh and Af-Laawe now walked, minibuses ferrying passengers negotiated their way and almost knocked down pedestrians as they avoided potholes. There were also plenty of Angora goats that may once have belonged to the Yemeni residents, and these were forced to feed on pebbles; there were no shrubs, and the grass and the cacti were dry. The cows Jeebleh saw chewed away at discarded shoes, for which the goats had no stomach. The dogs looked rabid and were so skinny you could see their protruding ribs; they ran off at the slightest hint of threat. There were waste dumps every few hundred meters or so, where vultures, marabous, and the odd crow were having a go at the pickings. Jeebleh felt he had arrived in an area just devastated by wildfire, which had reduced it to spectral ruins, with only the charred sticks of houses remaining.

He tried to express his sense of disbelief to Af-Laawe. “This city is a disaster. I haven’t met anyone who openly approves of what’s happening, and yet the fighting goes on and the clan elders continue soliciting funds for repairing deadly weapons. What’s going on?”

“It’s like a fashion,” Af-Laawe replied. “Every clan family feels that it has to form its own armed militia, because the others have them. The elders, almost all of them illiterate and out of touch with your and my sense of modernity, spend their time trying to raise funds from within the members of the blood community. In truth, it’s all a pose, though, and everybody knows that the elders are doing this to make sure they remain relevant.” Af-Laawe paused, surveyed the devastated street. “Incidentally, I agree with what you did, your refusal to pay for the repair of a battlewagon.”

Jeebleh looked away, at a crow that was being denied access to its fair share of carrion, the smallest of the vultures chasing it away every time it approached. This is a place of grief, he thought, in which even crows starve; in which goats feed on pebbles or clumps of earth, and cows on discarded shoes. What in God’s name was he doing here? He turned to Af-Laawe, silent.

Af-Laawe was ill at ease in the silence, and finally broke it. “I happened to be at Caloosha’s when the clan elders reported to him that not only did you send them away empty-handed, but you were rude to them too.”

“What was his reaction?” Jeebleh asked.

“He did his best to placate them.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He sounded as though he had your best interest at heart. He wants to be in their good books, and wants to make it up to you too in his own way.”

“I can’t believe what I am hearing.”

After a pause, Af-Laawe said, “The manager of the hotel phoned Caloosha, agitated.”

“And what’s with him?” Jeebleh asked.

“Something about the dog wore him to a frazzle.”

“The hell with it,” Jeebleh fumed.

His eyes focused and compact like a fruit stone, Af-Laawe recounted that the manager had called twice to lament that his hotel would now be remembered as the place where two terrible things happened, back to back, within half an hour.

It was incredible, Jeebleh thought, how speedily peoples’ moods changed, friendly one moment, hostile the next. Was this what his beloved country had been reduced to, a land where the elders were unaware of being out of touch with the times, and where the young were armed and not right in the head, killing without remorse?

“You know what I think?” Af-Laawe said.

“Tell me.”

“I think that because people who have lived under such stressful conditions assume they can set fire to vultures,” Af-Laawe said, “they believe they will rid the country of its problems by doing so.”

“But this is raving lunacy!”

Af-Laawe said nothing. He was busy responding to greetings from passersby. He nodded without bothering to pause or engage in conversation. He returned the greetings with the casualness of a superior officer acknowledging a minion.

They were joined by a mob of beggars, who addressed themselves only to Jeebleh, touching their bellies, then their mouths, asking for alms. Maybe they sensed that Jeebleh might have a softer center than his companion, who they knew was not in the habit of offering alms. Jeebleh could tell from their accent that they were from the bay region that was the center of savage wars launched by StrongmanSouth. The Major and the driver whom he had met in the previous days had hailed from the same Death Triangle.

“Does anyone help the city’s displaced?” Jeebleh asked.

“These live in the buildings around here, but no one looks out for them, or care what happens to them. Many of them beg and squat in the ruined properties of those who’ve fled or in the buildings that belonged to the state.”

“Any idea about how many there are?”

“They are about a million and a half, and they’re on the increase, every time there’s fighting.”

You’re seldom alone in the areas of a city where the poor are attracted in hope of finding help or a job, Jeebleh thought. There are beggars, shoeshine boys offering their services, urchins promising to look after your vehicle for a small fee, hangers-on, pimps, prostitutes, touts waiting to sponge on you.

One of the beggars stuck to Jeebleh, and kept saying, “God is generous!” But unlike the others, who rubbed their bellies and then touched the tips of their fingers to their lips, he asked for nothing. This made Jeebleh uncomfortable. Af-Laawe explained that the man had belonged to Mogadiscio’s middle class and had held a high position in the government. A longer look at the beggar revealed the telltale evidence. The man eyed Jeebleh as if he hoped he would recognize him, a man like himself, who had fallen on hard times. And even though he appeared no different from his fellow beggars, remarkably he communicated that he knew what dignity was. As a cloud of dust stirred and swirled around him, Jeebleh sensed that sorrow skulked in every grain of sand. He asked Af-Laawe, “Who is this man?”

“In his heyday, he was known as Xaar-Cune.”

So this is what’s become of EatShit, Jeebleh thought. A torturer with no equal, he had taken sadistic pleasure in forcing political detainees on hunger strike to do as his name suggested. He had served under Caloosha. “How was he reduced to this state?” Jeebleh asked.

“When the state collapsed, he stayed in the city, confident that no harm would come to him. But he made a mistake while foraging for political gain: he swore total loyalty to StrongmanSouth, who for a time put him to good use as a torturer. Because his mother, like mine, is from the north of the city, StrongmanSouth assigned to EatShit the job of ferrying messages between the two Strongmen. Then came the time when StrongmanSouth suspected EatShit of betraying him in an off-the-record remark to one of the local rags. He was summoned and humiliated in the presence of the in-group, and made to partake of a feast of feces.”

“And he was put out to grass here?”

“He was dumped here, painted with all sorts of shit and dung,” Af-Laawe said, “and everyone came out to mock him. His poor mother died soon after, heartbroken. His mind got twisted out of shape, and he fell into a state of utter malfunction.”

Sad, like an owl flying into the sun, Jeebleh prayed that someone, it didn’t matter who, might mete out similar or worse punishment to Caloosha. But when he considered that it might fall to him to do it, he felt like a man invited to a wake at which the dead got up to say their say, then departed, promising to return to torment those who had made their lives a misery.

“Would you like to have lunch?” asked Af-Laawe.

For a moment, Jeebleh didn’t want to think about food. But he was hungry. “Is there a restaurant nearby?”

“Right here,” Af-Laawe said.

Jeebleh saw a hole in a wall and a curtain billowing out. But there was no sign, no name.

Af-Laawe said, “Follow me,” and Jeebleh did so.

Inside, it was dim, and candles were burning; the atmosphere was more jazz club than lunch spot. A waitress in overalls led them to a table, and Af-Laawe ordered their first course with exaggerated élan.

“DESPITE IT ALL, WE’RE ALL INTIMATES, YOU KNOW.”

“We? Who do you mean?” Jeebleh asked. With his back to the wall, he watched the candles nodding this way and that. Figures sat close together at other tables as though in whispery conspiracy; he couldn’t see their faces.

“Do you know why,” Af-Laawe said, “when a wife is found dead under suspicious circumstances, her husband is brought in and questioned in depth?”

“Because he is an intimate?”

“Precisely.”

Jeebleh was unsure what to say; he waited.

“In a civil war, death is an intimate,” Af-Laawe said. “You’re killed by a person with whom you’ve shared intimacies, and who will kill you, believing that he will benefit from your death. And when you think seriously about an entire country going up in civil war flames, then you’ll agree that ‘intimacy’ is more complicated.”

“I hadn’t thought of intimacy in that sense,” Jeebleh admitted.

“Do you know the Somali term for ‘civil war’?”

“Dagaalka sokeeye.”

“Precisely,” Af-Laawe asserted.

In his mind, Jeebleh couldn’t decide how to render the Somali expression in English, in the end preferring the notion “killing an intimate” to “warring against an intimate.” Maybe the latter described better what was happening in Somalia. He was uncertain what to say next, and waited.

Af-Laawe went on, lapsing now and then into Italian: “The phrase, as you know, is of recent coinage, and it explains quite aptly something about the intimate nature of the civil war. Questioned in depth and under the investigative powers of the police, many a husband whose wife has died under suspicious circumstances will fidget, even if he is innocent. ‘Where were you on Thursday evening between nine and eleven?’ Every private thing is made public, and the husband must prove his innocence.”

The waitress who served their spaghetti all’amatriciana, was not the one who had taken the order, and apparently she knew Af-Laawe. “Would you like me to bring your usual with your meal?” she said.

Af-Laawe shook his head no, then asked Jeebleh what he might like to drink. Jeebleh ordered lemonade, and Af-Laawe told the waitress to make it two.

“If I remember correctly, the driver who gave me a lift from the airport, thanks to your kindness, told me that you lived in Alsace. When did you come home from Alsace?” Jeebleh asked.

“I bought myself a ticket as soon as I heard that the Dictator had been chased out,” Af-Laawe said. “When I arrived, there was still a palpable joy in the city because he had fled. The mood was short-lived, however. Soon it became a matter of us and them, clan families versus clan families. Instead of celebrating victory, it was the start of the war of the intimates! I couldn’t stand the thought of being part of this kind of schism, so I returned to Alsace.”

“Were you here during the four-month war between the two Strongmen, when the city was severed in two?” Jeebleh asked.

“I wasn’t here, but we are still living with the consequences of that war.”

“How so?”

“Those four months of war made it clear that the idea of the clan is a sham, as some of us believed all along,” Af-Laawe said. “More recently, those of us who think of ourselves as progressive argue not only that the clan is a sham, but that you cannot organize civil society around it.”

“When did you come back to Mogadiscio?”

“I returned a few months after UNOSOM got here.”

When they had finished the first course, Af-Laawe asked for his usual, which Jeebleh suspected had in it a tot of something forbidden in an Islamic country. Eventually another waitress brought baked fish in garlic sauce for Af-Laawe and pepper steak, well done, for Jeebleh, and a salad for each. Jeebleh listened, as Af-Laawe continued talking.

“Some of us are of a ‘we’ generation, others a ‘me’ generation. You mix the two modes of being, and things become awkward, unmanageable. I belong to the me generation, whereas my clan elders belong to the we generation. A man with a me mindset and a family of four — a wife and two children — celebrates the idea of ‘me.’ It is not so when it comes to our clansmen who visit from the hinterland, and who celebrate a ‘we.’ They believe in the clan, and they know no better — many of them have never been to school or out of the country. I am included in their self-serving ‘we.’ This leads to chaos.”

Pausing, he glanced at Jeebleh, who obviously wasn’t enjoying this monologue. Af-Laawe resumed: “You and I belong to the me generation. We’re professionals with qualifications, and we can survive on our own anywhere. You’re a university professor, and I am a highly paid consultant. So far so good?”

It wasn’t, but what the hell. Jeebleh nodded.

“But while our European counterparts belong wholeheartedly to the me idea, you and I belong at one and the same time to the me and the we. After all, we have extended families to clothe and to feed, by fair means or foul. You and I, indeed many of us first-generation schoolgoers, are made up of competing ways of doing things.”

Jeebleh didn’t agree with the spin that Af-Laawe put on things, his belief that educated Somalis didn’t believe in the clan; he, Jeebleh, knew many who did. But he chose not to challenge.

“If you peel away the political rhetoric,” Af-Laawe went on, “what you have is a me grievance dressed in we clothing! And with such overriding loyalties, driven by personal ambitions, the invented memories of a me are cast in an imagined we. This way ‘me’ is reinvented as ‘we.’”

To Jeebleh, Af-Laawe’s nonsensical double-talk made mockery of his own earlier pronoun fixation, and he was relieved when the waitress came to clear their plates. Af-Laawe ordered a cappuccino, and Jeebleh a double espresso.

As the waitress walked away, Jeebleh said, “Do you have any sympathy whatsoever for the warlords?”

“How can I raise a heart of sympathies for killers?”

AS THEY WALKED BACK TO THE HOTEL, THE STARES OF THE PEOPLE THEY encountered overwhelmed Jeebleh with foreboding. He had no idea why the feeling had come over him. He wanted to be alone, that was his instantaneous reaction. In times of sorrow, he tended to enjoy being by himself. Alas, this was not possible here on unfamiliar ground. He didn’t know how to get back, or where the dangers lurked.

As if to reinforce the point, as soon as they walked into the hotel grounds, he saw that the vultures were back in force. And a horde of buzzing flies hovered over a spot as red as fresh slaughter. Ali, the manager, met them in the courtyard, disheveled and distraught; you could see he was the bearer of sad news. Curiously, he spoke only to Af-Laawe, as if Jeebleh, a foreigner, did not understand Somali, or were not there at all.

Shaken by the story he had to tell, Ali spoke confusedly, starting where he should have ended. “There were two of them, both young,” he said.

“Two? Who?” Af-Laawe instructed Ali to calm down, not once but several times.

His shirt hanging out, his fly open — something he didn’t notice till later — the manager tried two or three times to begin from the beginning. Still, Jeebleh and Af-Laawe failed to understand. Finally he came out with: “One of them was killed.”

“But who do you mean?”

“And the other, he was wounded, and has since been captured by our guards, and taken to a nearby hospital, where he is recovering.”

The story became clearer in the fourth retelling. Two young men with firearms had sneaked into the hotel, and — with help from a staff member, who had since been fired — got into Jeebleh’s suite and hid there. A cleaning woman noticed a suspicious presence and reported it to the reception desk. Hotel security was alerted, there was a scuffle, shots were fired, and one of the intruders died inside. (“You can see his blood on the balcony, although his corpse has been removed,” the manager elaborated.) The wounded one was apprehended and interrogated. When he was frisked by hotel security, “incriminating evidence” was found in his pocket.

“What kind of evidence?” Jeebleh asked.

Ali spoke directly to Jeebleh for the first time since their return to the hotel. “He had your name and suite number written on a piece of paper. We’ve interrogated him, as I’ve already explained, and even though he hasn’t volunteered a lot, we’re satisfied with what we’ve gotten out of him.”

“But this is madness!” Af-Laawe said.

The manager sobered up, perhaps at the word “madness.” He continued to address Jeebleh, “There’s no reason to panic. We’ll change your room, give you my suite. It’s much more comfortable, and a lot more secure. We’ll beef up the security around you. No reason to panic. We’ll take care of you, despite what’s happened, or what you’ve done here on my hotel grounds. I guarantee that you’re safe with us, safe!”

“Where’s the corpse?” Af-Laawe asked.

“In your van.”

“And my bags?” Jeebleh asked.

“In my suite, safe.”

Jeebleh was relieved that he had had the foresight to leave his valuables with Bile. He decided to call him and ask him to send Dajaal, with a driver, to fetch him. He needed a quiet moment, to contemplate all this madness.

He stood apart, and used the mobile phone. “I need your immediate help, Bile,” he said. “It’s urgent.”

“Where are you, what’s happening?”

“I need you to get me away from this place.”

“What’s happened?”

“A young man found hiding in my room has been shot dead, another has been wounded.” Jeebleh’s voice was low, charged with a mix of anger and terror; his whole body was shaking. “I’ve no idea what’s happening. I want to leave this place as fast as I possibly can. Please send Dajaal.”

“I will.”

“Thanks.”

“Do be watchful,” Bile advised, “and stay calm.”

“I will,” Jeebleh said, and disconnected. He turned and felt a nervous change in his surroundings. He heard the hotel gate open. A huge man waddled in: Caloosha, making a dramatic entrance.

At once everybody tried to be useful to him, the men at the gate opening it wider, others standing to attention. A handful of bodyguards, among them Kaahin and men he had seen earlier, walked beside him and behind, their guns at the ready. Ali arrived pronto, half running. He stopped a few meters before the visiting VIP, then bowed as if to royalty. Caloosha dismissed everyone, including his bodyguards and the manager, and moved to a café table nearby. He sat down with the slowness of a hippo that had eaten its fill, and summoned Jeebleh and Af-Laawe. As he approached, Jeebleh could tell that Caloosha was in a rage, glowering at Af-Laawe. “Where did you go?”

“To eat,” Af-Laawe said sheepishly.

Now Caloosha said to Jeebleh, “Did he drink?”

Jeebleh couldn’t control himself. “What does it matter if Af-Laawe has taken a drink? My concern here is about death. Did you have a hand in it? Was I supposed to be here when the youths sneaked into my room? Is this why you’re asking Af-Laawe where we went?”

“There’s been a lapse in your security,” Caloosha said.

He couldn’t believe his ears: “A lapse in my security?”

“And Af-Laawe is responsible for it.”

“What does ‘a lapse in security’ mean?”

“Someone who was supposed to be here wasn’t.”

“And Af-Laawe is to blame?” Jeebleh asked.

Night had descended early in Af-Laawe’s eyes, and he hung his head in despair — his ear, in Jeebleh’s disturbed thinking, assumed the shape of a full-grown bat.

Jeebleh turned to Af-Laawe. “If there is something you haven’t told me, please speak up.”

“We were supposed to go to Caloosha’s house,” Af-Laawe replied, “where you were to meet the clan elders and apologize. But I took you to my favorite restaurant instead. Caloosha thinks that the incident with the dog is my fault too, because I was supposed to keep you company and out of mischief.”

“Am I a child, whose every activity must be supervised, lest it be seen as mischievous?” Jeebleh said. “Am I to be told when to apologize to self-serving elders?”

“That’s no way to react,” Caloosha said.

Jeebleh spoke at the top of his voice, clearly impervious to the reaction of those in his vicinity. “Am I not a venerable elder myself, not of a clan, God forbid, but just a venerable elder? To earn everyone’s respect, do I need to put on two robes dipped in mud and then dried before I wear them?”

Caloosha kept silent.

“Who is the dead boy?”

“The son of one of the clan elders, whom you insulted earlier today and sent off empty-handed,” Caloosha replied.

“Will there be other deaths because of his?”

“That can’t be helped!”

“I don’t want any more deaths, not on my account,” Jeebleh said. “I forbid you to let your mad dogs loose on the family of the dead boy. There have been enough mindless killings already. I forbid you to kill on my account, my conscience won’t allow it.”

Caloosha met Jeebleh’s earnestness with sarcasm. “Sadly, I don’t have a conscience.”

“It’s high time you reactivated one.”

“I’m afraid I cannot,” he said, mimicking Jeebleh’s serious tone, “as I sold my conscience to the devil to pay for a mortgage on the house of my self-promotion. To date I’ve survived on the proceeds, and I doubt I want to buy it back, thank you!”

“Hell was invented for your kind.”

“I am sure it was!” Caloosha bellowed.

Before either managed to raise the stakes any further, Dajaal was standing there between them, unarmed. Caloosha’s bodyguards closed in on him and waited for instructions.

Caloosha held his rage in check, his eyes fixed on Jeebleh, then on Dajaal. “Why are you here?”

“Don’t ask me,” Dajaal said calmly. “Ask Jeebleh.”

Af-Laawe got up and walked to a spot he seemed to calculate as beyond the range of a stray bullet. Caloosha, meanwhile, gestured to his bodyguards to relax.

“I’m going to spend a couple of nights at Bile’s,” Jeebleh said, “and then decide what to do.”

“Why not move in with me?” asked Caloosha.

“Let’s talk in a couple of days, and maybe I will.” And to the manager, Jeebleh called, “My bags, please!”

“We’ll beef up security,” Ali promised.

Jeebleh assured him that he had wanted to spend a couple of days with Bile anyway. When he was paying his bill, he saw Caloosha eyeing the manager and shaking his head, indicating that he shouldn’t accept the money.

“Take an overnight bag,” Caloosha suggested, “and then return in two days. Look how well I compromise!”

“I promise I will visit you, Caloosha!” Jeebleh said. He asked Dajaal to take his bags to the car. He hoped he wasn’t making more unnecessary enemies out of Caloosha, the manger, or Af-Laawe. He was determined to buy himself time: to think, to figure out whom to trust, to plot. “I want to see you both,” he told Caloosha and Af-Laawe, “when I come to the north. Now, before I go, do you have any news about Faahiye, Raasta, or my mother’s housekeeper?”

“We’re working on the assignments,” Caloosha said, his mockery gentler, even friendly, now.

“Patience!” Af-Laawe added.

Jeebleh waited in silence until everybody seemed relaxed, in particular Caloosha’s bodyguards. He stole a glance at Dajaal and by chance intercepted a communication between him and Kaahin. He didn’t know what to make of it; didn’t know whether he should view it as harmful to his own prospects for survival. Death is your most intimate neighbor when you are in Mogadiscio, Jeebleh thought, as he went out of the hotel gate, speaking to no one but also showing no sign of fear.