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14

JEEBLEH WAS IN SUCH DISTRESS THAT HE FELT HE COULD LIVE ONLY ONE minute at a time. He was unable to remember things in any detail; concepts like “an hour ago,” “yesterday,” “tomorrow,” “last week,” “next week” were meaningless with all that had taken place.

He was certain that staying on in Mogadiscio would not be the same — even if he had no way of knowing whether his own actions had factored into the killing of the youth in the hotel. He reviewed the events, and everything became suspect. Was the young man running away, out of the room, when the bullet struck him dead? Did he mean to kill Jeebleh, and if so, why? Was it because he had insulted the clan elders, or because he had been kind to the Alsatian in labor?

Disoriented by the urgency of his existence, and stymied by the demands on his time, Jeebleh had acquired other priorities, besides and beyond finding his mother’s grave and paying her his respects. He had lost his way in the labyrinthine politics of the place, and the labyrinth seemed to have Caloosha at its center. The man had had a wicked hand in his and Bile’s detention; another in encouraging the elders of the clan to call on him to extract the funds they needed; and yet another in having him shadowed from the instant he landed. If he had the wherewithal to have Jeebleh tailed to wherever he went, to “provide him with protection,” as he put it, it followed that he also had the means to have him killed if he so chose.

Jeebleh hoped that he wasn’t losing his marbles, becoming paranoid and joining Mogadiscio’s multitudes of borderline schizophrenics. He remembered Ali’s pleading with him, when they first met, not to judge “them” too harshly. Jeebleh was quitting the north of the city, where his clansmen formed the majority, and taking up residence in the south, where Bile’s folks reigned. He found it ironic that he felt safer outside his clansmen’s territory.

In the car, he broke the silence, saying to Dajaal, “Tell me a little about Kaahin.”

Dajaal did not answer immediately. Waiting for an answer, Jeebleh was haunted by two images: in one, Kaahin and Dajaal communicated secretly, in a way that suggested conspiracy; in the other, Caloosha and Dajaal exchanged burning looks. The silence lengthening, Jeebleh noticed that the same driver was taking the same route as before to Bile’s. Then a third image came to him: a vulture, the size of a Cinquecento, flying off into high heaven with a baby goat in its claws!

“Kaahin and I were very close at one time,” Dajaal said. “We were both army officers, we’d see each other at the mess frequently. And we were tennis partners. But we fell out just before the collapse of the state. Over a family matter.”

“You aren’t related, are you?” Jeebleh said.

“We could’ve been, but we aren’t.”

He fell silent, knowing that this wouldn’t make much sense. Embarrassed, he looked away, averting his gaze from the driver too. He rubbed his face, like a monkey reflecting. There was an eerie quiet in the vehicle now, as though all three men had taken temporary residence outside of time, and were dwelling in a nightmare of family disloyalties and dissonance. The driver nodded at Dajaal, as if encouraging him to say what was on his mind.

“We came to fierce blows, Kaahin and I, when I learned that my youngest sister’s child was his, and yet he wouldn’t own up to it. Lately, since he admitted that he is the biological father of the boy, who is now eleven and living in Canada, we’ve been meeting to try to work things out.”

“Do you meet in secret or openly?” Jeebleh asked.

“In secret, of course,” Dajaal said.

“Because it would upset Caloosha?”

“It would, yes,” replied Dajaal. “Anyhow, I doubt that Kaahin would talk of this to anyone, least of all Caloosha, who would use it against him. It’s not in my favor or his for such things to come to light.”

A whirlwind gathered and blocked the sun from Jeebleh’s vision. He wondered whether Caloosha’s discovery of these secret encounters of Dajaal and Kaahin might start another battle between the warring factions. He imagined fingers on triggers, imagined the joy on the faces of drug-crazed youths shooting and watching, as their victims collapsed in a heap of death.

“Here we are!” the driver said.

WHEN HE AND BILE MET IN THESE CHANGED CIRCUMSTANCES, THE ONE A host, the other a guest, Jeebleh was unable to recall things in as much detail as he would have liked. But he managed to tell Bile what had happened and in little time, fearing that he might not carry the telling through to the end. Bile listened without comment or interruption. When he was finished, Jeebleh felt restless, so he stood and opened the windows, wandered about, and then opened his shoulder bag, out of which he took the books he had brought as gifts. He presented them to Bile without ceremony, and then sat down, again without ceremony.

“Do you feel betrayed?” Bile asked.

“I hurt!”

Still restless, Jeebleh rose again and paced back and forth, agitated one moment, depressed the next, up and moving purposelessly one instant, down and wincing the next. At some point, he was surprised to find himself facing Bile, who had gotten to his feet too.

“Let’s go!”

Jeebleh didn’t ask where.

HE FOLLOWED BILE DOWN A FLIGHT OF STAIRS AT A RUN; THEN DOWN ANOTHER set of steps, which he approached with caution; past a knot of women, some washing their babies, others busy cooking at braziers; past a group of men sitting uncomfortably on a mat, playing cards.

Jeebleh was becoming two people, one leading a familiar life, the other a life that was unfamiliar; one looking in from the outside, the other looking out from inside. Alive to his surroundings, he was able, with his active side, to spot the security detail shadowing them. He could see Dajaal and two young men tailing them. His more contemplative side wondered whether the civil conflict was being driven as much as greed — the quick gains and limitless profits available for the warlords — as by bloodlust, shedding the blood of others to settle centuries-old scores. He questioned Bile as they walked.

“Money runs the civil war’s engine, all right,” Bile agreed. “There are the corrupt commissions paid to the warlords for a start, the money they make from hiring out militiamen to foreign delegations on visits. There’s the money paid to the warlords in the form of tributes by foreign firms operating in the country. And Mogadiscians also pay other tributes to the warlords, who levy road tax and duties on everything imported through the entry points of the city, which they control.”

Jeebleh remembered being stopped in the car, and StrongmanSouth’s armed youths in fatigues readying to extort money when they recognized Dajaal. “Why do most vehicles on the roads have plates from the Arabian Gulf, and why do they all look just-bought?” he asked.

“Bringing vehicles in from the Arabian Gulf is a racket, all right!”

Jeebleh waited for an explanation.

“When a vehicle is in an accident and is written off somewhere in Europe or the USA,” Bile said, “a mechanic puts it back together and has it repainted, makes it look as good as new. An import dealer brings the reconditioned vehicles into the Gulf, usually into the Emirates, which specializes in import/export. The cars are quickly re-exported to Mogadiscio or Nairobi. Many vehicles stolen in Europe end up in the Gulf in the same way, and they’re sent on to other countries with little or no customs control.”

Jeebleh was amazed. “There’s a racket everywhere you turn, isn’t there? And I bet the rackets are run by the same people who run the guns!”

Bile explained that vehicle owners hired gunmen for protection, and the more expensive the car, the more gunmen needed. But in the earlier days of the civil war, cars had their fuel tanks rebuilt in a way that reduced the fuel intake. In those days it was common to see two-liter plastic containers on the floor of a vehicle, by means of which the engine was fed, through a hose. You couldn’t travel great distances, because you ran out of fuel frequently, and had to refuel more often. But your car was safe from potential carjackers.

“An American journalist described Somalia as an ideal model for the rest of the continent,” Jeebleh said. “In his view, Africans could do away with governments by studying what’s happening in Mogadiscio, where telephones work better now than they did when there was a state. The same journalist pointed out that whereas there used to be only one daily newspaper — the government’s mouthpiece — now there are no fewer than thirteen dailies, with opposing views. What do you think?”

“What do I think? Where’s this journalist on education?” Bile challenged. “Where is he on providing hospitals, or security and other social services to the ordinary person with no gun? Every Somali not in the pay of a warlord would agree with me that even an inefficient and corrupt government will offer better services than those provided so far by the warlords, who are in the business not of building institutions but of demolishing them. The services may be faulty and faltering in other countries, but any central government, however weak it is, will do better than these murderous warlords and their cartels. Just look at this city! You know what it used to be like.”

“Are the warlords subservient to business cartels?”

“As long as they are from the same blood community. Fact: The warlords and the business community stand to profit from every skirmish, every confrontation. Fact: Most fighting takes place outside business hours, in the late afternoon, when the markets have closed for the day, or very early in the morning, before they have reopened, or at night. I would say that the so-called markets have something to do with much of the fighting, but you can’t divide business and blood so easily in this country.”

“It doesn’t look that way from the outside!”

“Of course it doesn’t.”

Jeebleh murmured to himself: Warlords, market forces!

With subliminal grief on his face, Bile continued, “Some people, as a matter of fact, trace the falling-out of StrongmanSouth and StrongmanNorth to the arrival of billions’ worth of Somali banknotes flown in from England, where they had been printed for the former dictator’s regime. All hell broke loose when the plane bringing the banknotes in from Nairobi was diverted to an airstrip in the north of the city.”

“By StrongmanNorth?” Jeebleh asked.

“The excessive greed of both strongmen produced fragmentation, then a civil war,” Bile said. He stopped suddenly and turned to Jeebleh: “Here we are!”

“Where’s here?”

“The Refuge.”

THE GATE SLUMPED ON ITS HINGES, CREAKING FORWARD, ITS BOTTOM EDGE almost touching the ground, its paint flaking off. Jeebleh assumed that it was seldom closed, and imagined children and abused women walking in, the children to be looked after and fed, and the abused women to receive comfort and professional counseling. You didn’t need to close such a gate.

As he and Bile passed through, Jeebleh saw a number of bungalows. There was a sign saying “HOYI”—shelter — in prominent capitals, and a smaller one announcing “The Refuge.” “In days now long gone,” Bile explained, “when schools ran morning, afternoon, and evening sessions, most of these bungalows served as dormitories. Day students of several secondary schools in the neighborhood, whose parents lived in other towns, used to stay here.”

They walked past a low-ceilinged cottage where youths in dark overalls were gathered around a broken-down vehicle, being instructed in motor repair. As they walked farther, the din grew louder, and younger too. A bell rang, and twenty or thirty teenagers, most of them boys, came pouring out. Jeebleh and Bile stood aside. A door behind them opened, and more boys and girls, younger than the previous group, came out, running with the uninhibited enthusiasm of youth. The girls were giggly, the boys full of chase. They seemed so much younger than the armed youths at the airport, or the runners at the hotel.

An elderly woman greeted Bile by name, and then acknowledged Jeebleh’s presence with a nod. Jeebleh learned that she was in charge of the children, with the help of several younger women. To one side, a man was bending down to tie the shoelaces of a very small girl.

Peace reigned here, Jeebleh thought. Bile had created several overlapping worlds, ideally conceived: the flat he shared with Seamus; The Refuge; the clinic, which Jeebleh had yet to see; and Raasta and Makka’s world too, temporarily interrupted as that might be. These worlds were contrasted starkly with what one might experience in the rest of the city. They were oases of comfort in a land of sorrow.

Bile pushed open a door to the anteroom of an office. On the wall were photographs of children, some in school uniform, some not. For a moment, Jeebleh was lost in reverie, forgetting where he was. He stared at images of boys and girls receiving awards from an Italian monsignor. There were captioned photographs of a swimmer receiving a medal, a chess player who had finished second at a competition in Prague, a runner who had been second fastest in a steeplechase competition.

“Did you choose this place?” Jeebleh asked.

“Do you recall what it used to be?”

“I remember we used to call it ‘The Dormer.’ When we were in our teens, it was a dormitory run by the Roman Catholic Church. It was a home to abandoned children, who were looked after by the fathers. And before that, it belonged to a Sicilian who had named it Villa San Giovanni.”

“Well done!” Bile said.

“Now tell me more about it.”

As it happened, Bile had walked into the building by chance one day, a few months into the civil war. He was on some errand or other, and for some reason took a detour. Maybe a mysterious force had led him here. He came upon a child in a corner, wrapped in a blanket and smartly dressed in pants and a handsome T-shirt with writing in Gothic script. The presence of the girl in an empty dormitory made no sense, and there was no way of knowing who had left her there. When he returned home with a girl for whom he had no name, Shanta and Faahiye, with whom Bile shared the house then, decided on one for her, because she kept pointing to herself and saying something close to “Marta,” or was it “Marcia”? They called her Makka, and sure enough, she responded to it.

They fell silent as a young man entered the office without knocking. He brought them tea on a tray. Bile nodded a thank you and waited until they were alone to speak further. “In another sense, you could say that Raasta brought us all here.”

“How’s that?”

“Or rather, I should say that Raasta brought her mother here, as a prelude to her being born. And then guess what? Dajaal met Shanta here, again by chance.”

“I won’t ask what Dajaal was doing here either.”

“He was in charge of the force holding the district.”

“Go back to Shanta, or how Raasta brought her here.”

“It’s all fascinating and complicated,” Bile said, and paused. “Shanta was very pregnant with Raasta, eight months or so. She had gone to an appointment with an obstetrician, but because of the fierce fighting between the clan militia and the Tyrant’s forces, the doctor wasn’t there. Shanta had walked a great distance, all the way from Digfar hospital. The fighting between the clan militiamen and the regime was very fierce, bombs were falling everywhere. But at no time, Shanta would tell me later, did she fear for her own life or her baby’s.”

A handheld radio on Bile’s desk came to life, and the static in the room made him silent. They listened as two women talked about provisions for The Refuge, which one of them was supposed to obtain.

When they signed off, Bile continued: “It was probably Shanta’s weighty bladder that brought her here. She was in need of a toilet, tired, so she found a bed and fell asleep. Sometime later, after it had gotten dark, Dajaal, who was in command of the group fighting against the Tyrant’s forces in the district, woke her up. He went to get her husband, who helped find a midwife. Then Dajaal led me to her, in time to deliver Raasta into the world. So we’re all connected to this place!”

DINNER AT THE REFUGE PROVED TO BE AN EYE-OPENER.

Jeebleh had to sit on a mat on the floor. If he needed a reminder that he was physically out of shape, then here it was, drilling pain into his knees, his upper thighs, even his heels. He could not tuck his feet under his body, as the others all managed to do with ease. Even though he ached terribly, he remained in a crouch, and kept changing position. Finally he squatted, balancing himself on the tips of his toes.

“Who are these children, and why them?” he asked.

“In the main, there are periods when there is little or no fighting, and periods when the strife is more intense,” Bile replied. “The bulk of the children, those who form the core group, we refer to as ‘inmates.’ A third of the children you see qualify as ‘tourists’—they’ve fled the fighting in their villages, but they plan to go back when the fighting dies down.”

The refectory was noisy. There were younger children, numbering about thirty, and adults supervising their eating. There were teenagers and young men. They sat on the floor, close to where Jeebleh and Bile were sharing a large plate with Dajaal and the driver. There were nine massive plates in all, with seven or eight people to each one.

“We’ve resorted to the traditional method of eating together daily from the same mayida,” Bile said, “in the belief that we create a camaraderie and we’ll all trust one another. Some might consider hogwash the idea that those who look one another in the eye as they eat together are bound closely to one another. But our experiment bears it out — anyone meaning to do harm to a fellow sharer of the mayida will not dare look him, or anyone else, in the eye. Around here we say that many people prefer staying away to coming and sharing the mayida when there is bad blood. And when we share the mayida, there can be no bad blood.”

“A brilliant idea,” Jeebleh agreed.

15

“YOU MUST TELL ME ABOUT RAASTA AND MAKKA,” JEEBLEH SAID.

“I’ll be very pleased to,” Bile replied.

They were now back in the apartment, the light in Bile’s eyes suggesting sorrow coming home. For his part, Jeebleh was restless again. They sat on the balcony, a touch of salt in the early-evening breeze.

Jeebleh told Bile that for his own belated benefit, he wanted to know better what had happened on the day the two girls disappeared.

“We’ve been able to piece together, from talking to two women who work at The Refuge, that Makka was the first to go missing,” Bile said. “This is because something unusual occurred earlier that day. A girl around six or seven years old probably, arrived at the gate, dressed in an outfit made up of colorful beads, similar to the kind that bare-breasted Zulu maidens wear. She stood where she was for a good while, but wouldn’t come into the compound. Neither of the two women knew who she was, where she came from, who had dropped her at the gate, or picked her up when she eventually left, about twenty minutes later, walking north, vanishing into the mystery that had brought her forth. Makka saw the girl at the same time as the two women did, and soon afterward started acting like she was under some sort of spell, shaking. The two women agree that our Makka was so taken with the girl’s beads that she followed her when they were called away to attend to some problem.”

“And then what happened?”

“Makka returned, alone,” Bile said. “And a short time later, Makka went out again, apparently in search of the beaded girl. The two women remember Makka saying that she had come for Raasta, so they could go ‘play beads’ with the other girl, or something like that. And she said something about a man and a woman. Many things are not clear.”

“And Raasta?”

“Raasta was very agitated to learn that Makka had gone off on her own. And she went in search of her.”

“Then?” Jeebleh asked.

“The women saw a fancy car with tinted windows, engine running, parked at a road to the south of ours. By the time we mounted a search in the neighborhood, we couldn’t find any sign of the car. A neighbor claims to have seen one of the men. He had shades on, the kind often worn by gangsters in American films.”

Jeebleh mused aloud, as though to himself, “I wouldn’t have thought that fancy vehicles would be commonly seen in the potholed streets of civil war Mogadiscio.”

“There is such a fleet, which once belonged to the now collapsed state,” Bile said.

“Is this why everyone assumes that a warlord is behind the disappearance of the two girls?”

Bile picked his words with caution: “To spare her from worrying too much unnecessarily, we haven’t told Shanta everything we know. Only the two women and I know about the fancy car.”

A long, long silence followed.

“TELL ME MORE,” JEEBLEH SAID.

“They’re so unalike, it’s incredible,” Bile said. “But they have become completely dependent on each other, and are beginning to look alike, in their own fashion. You know the story, when a man and his wife have lived together for many years, they begin to sound alike. In fact, Raasta and Makka do sound alike, to a certain degree.” Bile paused, perhaps suddenly conscious of his natural use of the present tense, a sign of his belief that the girls were well and unharmed.

Jeebleh remained silent. He did not mention that he had spoken to Caloosha about the girls, because he wished neither to raise Bile’s hopes nor to dash them.

“Except for the day of their disappearance, neither girl does anything or goes anywhere without the other knowing about it,” Bile continued. “They’re like Siamese twins, neither makes a move without the other being there.”

“So whoever separated them on the day they went missing knew what they were doing — lure one away and you get the other,” Jeebleh guessed. “Could it have been an inside job?”

Bile wasn’t ready for speculation. “Where Raasta intimates care, Makka communicates boundless, generous love. No one knows exactly how old Makka is, or how she came to be sleeping in that room at The Dormer where I found her. She’s given to kissing, to touching, and to trusting people. There’s a smile forever on her lips, and she displays joy at every opportunity, seldom crying, rarely showing any depression, which other children in similar circumstances might. Often I tell myself that she’s held together within the framework of a narrative not yet known to us, that she’s an untold story. Her every word points to so many unasked questions needing answers. At The Refuge, she is treated with great affection, because of her special qualities. Everyone is kind to her. She smiles crying, and cries earnestly, laughing. Compared with her, I feel a great lack.”

This was how he had found her: He heard a bizarre sound coming from what he presumed an integral part of the mystery that is nature. He was in The Dormer all on his own, when he picked up a sound between a gargle, a clearing of the throat preparatory to making a long speech, and a growl, a form of communication more associated with animals not endowed with speech. Once he found the Down’s-syndrome girl, a little bundle in the fashionable clothes of a child from a well-to-do family, it had taken Bile several minutes to decide that she was speaking not Somali, but a language that sounded like German. He wished Seamus were there, as he might have known whether it was German or Flemish or Dutch. Bile could only assume that she was half Somali, half European, the European half unspecified. The sounds she had mumbled — deciphered and rearranged in his head — did not form a phrase, and led him nowhere. She had a nasal form of speech, n’s colliding with a handful of g’s. It was hopeless to try to understand what she was saying. It was a lot easier to comprehend Raasta’s babbling than to disentangle the jamboree of Makka’s words.

Whereas Raasta made progress by great leaps and bounds when it came to the mastery of language, Makka did not. She was fond of repeating a stock phrase: “Aniga, anigoo ah!” This Somali phrase meaning “I myself am!” would be considered sophisticated in any language. But was it what Makka meant to say? Rendering the phrase to Seamus as “Me, myself, I,” Bile couldn’t help wondering whether there was a purpose to the Down’s-syndrome girl. It didn’t take long for Raasta to prove to all concerned that Makka was a genius of sorts. The two girls were friends to peace, to harmony.

Then one day, three years to the day on which she first appeared mysteriously, Makka began to thread and unthread rosaries. She took to doing this whenever she was awake, busy as someone who had discovered her vocation. Bile found her as many spools of thread as he could. She was very diligent, and was blessed with a concentrated look that defined her. It was charming to watch her, her lower lip distended, a trace of saliva as clear as a raindrop in the recesses of her open mouth, the wrinkles on her forehead thick as homespun cotton. She was in the habit of muttering things to herself, frequently repeating “Aniga, anigoo ah!” He thought of the phrase as a unique feature of Makka’s.

She had more words now, thanks to the therapy given to her by foreign specialists, Irish volunteer teachers who spent a few months at a time at The Refuge. Makka’s words wove themselves into an embroidered pattern — her ellipses.

A wonder of affection, Makka gave huge kisses — and liberally. Raasta more than anyone else mined her wealth of emotions from deep down, where only she could tap, willy-nilly. Hugging Makka to herself, their cheeks touching, Raasta would mumble words, and Makka would repeat after her, altering the sequence slightly or changing the pronunciation. Then Makka’s mouth would remain open, and the words would fail her.

Everyone congregated around them, loving them. The girls helped the others cope with the stormy weather of clan politics. If there was one huge difference between Makka and Raasta, it had to do with memory. Makka was in the moment, and the moment was innocence, pure and simple. She was in no one else’s camp, only in her own. She belonged to no clan and to no one but herself. The Refuge provided her with a family, and she provided The Refuge with her absolute loyalty. By contrast, Raasta had been taught who she was, that is to say, what her clan family was, from the instant she opened her lungs with the cry of life.

“What was Faahiye’s attitude toward Makka?”

Bile rose in an instant surge of unease. “Just a minute, please,” he said, and was gone.

Minutes later, Jeebleh heard a toilet flushing, then footsteps returning.

IT APPEARED THAT BILE HAD REACHED FOR AND RETURNED WITH A NEW VOICE, retrieved from deep within. He was much calmer. “You see,” he said, “even though Faahiye may have been present physically, it seemed to those of us in daily contact with him that he was not all there.”

“How was that?” Jeebleh asked.

“Some of us felt he was on some sort of suicide trip. He behaved recklessly, going to the areas of the city where deadly fighting was raging. He’d take along a camera, like a tourist on a suicide mission.”

“Did he show anyone the photographs he took?”

“He wouldn’t even bother to print them!”

“Didn’t he train as a lawyer?” Jeebleh asked.

“A lawyer in a lawless land, jobless and unemployable.”

“Didn’t he commit come of his free time to The Refuge at least? Didn’t he help run it?”

“We all wished he had,” Bile answered.

Voltaire had said that good, honest work done in God’s name banished three of the greatest evils — boredom, vice, and poverty. Thinking about Faahiye’s lack of commitment to the jobs at hand made Jeebleh wonder whether he would have been easier to deal with if he had had jobs and worked at them. And would the same have stopped Somalis from going down the inevitable road of self-destruction, self-hate, waste, and famine? Evil and envy gain a solid foothold in the mind of the jobless. His thought led him elsewhere: to sex. Jeebleh imagined that Faahiye was starved of love and sex. He asked Bile as much: “Did sex occupy a prominent place in his mind?”

You might have thought that the earth had been pulled from under Bile. Jeebleh was regretting his question.

“Why do you ask?”

“Yeats said that sex is the subtext of every ruined relationship. Or am I misquoting him?”

“We’ll have to ask Seamus about that.”

“About Faahiye and sex?”

“No, about Irish poets and sex!”

Jeebleh repeated, “Was sex the subtext in Shanta and Faahiye’s embittered relationship?”

“Put that question to them when you see them.”

HALF AN HOUR LATER, BILE’S FEATURES HAD ROUGHENED AT THE EDGES, LIKE frozen butter exposed to sudden heat. He said, “I knew very little of what had gone on before I came. But it became obvious that my presence was causing a great upset in the home they had set up for themselves. I admit I was insensitive at first too. Of that I am certain, and I regret it all the time.”

“What did you do?”

“We shared a limited space. We were on top of one another, and spent a lot of time together. Shanta and Faahiye quarreled so savagely in the first months of Raasta’s life that I moved out and set up my own place, within easy walking distance. By then Faahiye had tried to force himself on Shanta, soon after the traditional forty-day convalescence period. I didn’t care to know about it, but I got to hear of it because Shanta told me of her own free will. There were subsequent quarrels, in which he became unbearably offensive, at one time suggesting that Shanta was saving herself for the only man she had ever truly loved, namely me. Then they worked out a modus vivendi agreeable to both. He looked after Raasta in the early hours of the day — Shanta doesn’t wake up until noon, she’s that kind of person. And she looked after the girl in the afternoons and at night. This way, I managed to have uninterrupted time with Raasta when it was Shanta’s turn. It was all very complicated. There were so many borders we couldn’t cross, and so many things we couldn’t do. It’s a great relief that Raasta — and later Makka, when she joined us — didn’t collapse into a pair of tearful misfits. I’ve no idea how, but the two girls knew where the paths to doom and despair lay, and they kept well away from them, thank God.”

Bile was in the vortex of a huge sorrow, but he concentrated his mind wholly on the telling of the story. His features took on the darker hue of fabric soaking overnight in water. Now that he was immersed in his sorrow, Bile’s expression put Jeebleh in mind of the color of southwestern Nigerian adire cloth at its finest.

“Do you think he’s taken the girls hostage?”

“I don’t know,” Bile said.

Jeebleh could see the weight of Bile’s gloom lowering him into further despair. His pupils reduced to a darkness extending inward, into infinity.

“With help from Caloosha?”

“I wish I knew,” Bile said.

Jeebleh watched another cloud of sadness descending on Bile, much like the one before, an acknowledgment of a huge loss. A few seconds later, he sensed a pale reverie spreading itself over his face.

“The sorrow that’s home to us!” Bile cried.

Jeebleh wasn’t sure whether Bile was articulating a difficult concept with death in mind, but he was obviously withdrawing into himself, barely aware that Jeebleh was in the room with him.

“I think I am the cause of the hurt of which Faahiye has never been able to speak, given that he is so correct and proper in his demeanor,” Bile said. “It’s possible, however, that the source of his hurt, which in the end ruined their relationship, was sex, or rather lack of it. Memory is regret! Memory is regret. But what can I say?”

Jeebleh reached out to touch Bile, pat his knee.

“If only he had left when he should have, and taken his wife and daughter with him,” Bile said, “things might have been different for all of us. Now sorrow permeates our air, pricks it, and we hurt. Everyone hurts. And there’s no hurt like that of an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime he hasn’t committed, no hurt like that of a wife spurned, a love not reciprocated, a matrimonial bed abandoned, children turned into battlefields.”

Bile held his head between his trembling hands, and Jeebleh was not sure if he heard a faint sobbing. He could hear his friend’s breathing, soft like the patter of a baby’s footsteps. A big hush, then Bile lifted his head. His cheeks were moist. “It was a real shame!” he said.

“What was?”

“That Shanta accused Faahiye so unfairly.”

“Of what? What did she accuse him of?”

“A crying shame!”

“This is why he left?”

But Bile wouldn’t go into more detail, he wouldn’t answer the question. His head shaking, he would only say, “I believe Faahiye is innocent, a man wrongly accused!”

Jeebleh could think of nothing to respond.

“Let’s blame it on the civil war,” Bile said remorsefully. “Let’s blame it on our sick minds, on the tantrums that belong in our heads. Let’s blame it on the endemic violence, the cruelty that’s been let loose on the weak. Let’s blame it on our damaged sense of self.”

“But what did she accuse him of?”

Still Bile wouldn’t say, and he left the room.

16

“HAVE WE GRIEVED ENOUGH?” JEEBLEH ASKED.

“I doubt that we have,” Bile replied.

“Do we know how to grieve? And if we don’t, why not?”

“I don’t know if it is possible to have a good, clean grief when people have no idea how big a loss they have suffered, and when each individual continues denying his or her own part in the collapse.”

“Aren’t many Somalis mourning?”

“We mistake a personal hurt for a communal hurt,” Bile insisted. “I find this misleading, I find it highly unproductive.”

Jeebleh recalled Bile’s early loss of his own father, allegedly at Caloosha’s hands. Seamus had lost his brother, a sister, and his father to sectarian violence in Ireland. Does a child mourn a loss in the same way an adult does? Is there a time limit, a cutoff point after which grieving becomes ineffective?

“How have you coped?” Jeebleh asked.

“I’ve kept myself infernally busy, and I attend to other people’s needs, not mine. I haven’t had the time or the strength to grieve or to deal squarely with the ruin that is all around. Instead I wallow in my sorrows often enough, and feel a more profound despair when I think I might have achieved something more substantial if I had intervened politically, and tried to make peace between the warring sides.”

“Why haven’t you tried to do that?”

“I hadn’t realized until seeing you that I jumped in at the deep end on the day I gained my freedom and decided to stay, and when I chose to set up a refuge, look out for Raasta, be close to Shanta, who is forever needy, and not enter what passes for politics hereabouts.”

“Is there anybody for you to talk to?”

“It’s too late for me to search out interlocutors worth taking seriously and trusting, too late for me to get involved in peacemaking now.”

“Why is that?”

“I would be like an ant that got distracted and went out of the line and is now trying to find its way back into the ranks after a storm has disorganized the line.”

Bile’s worries were posted on his forehead, visible signs of what weighed on his mind. Jeebleh’s own restless thinking led him to his preoccupations. Unlike Bile, who had stayed away from “what passes for politics hereabouts,” he had taken the plunge into the chaotic energy of the place. Now, as a consequence, he was getting lost in the claims and counterclaims of clan politics.

A cat entered the room as though it had more rights to be there than Bile, the resident of the apartment, or his guest. To judge from the way Bile stared at the creature, they were strangers to each other; Jeebleh sensed an unspoken hostility. The cat looked at Jeebleh, then at Bile, then blinked at them both, and made itself comfortable as only cats can in a place where they do not belong. It took its feline time, stretching, yawning, looking at them again. It looked at Jeebleh and smiled, then at Bile without smiling, and caressed its whiskers, Jeebleh thought, in the brooding manner of a man pretending to be thinking.

“Have you met StrongmanSouth?” Jeebleh asked.

“I’ve never met him, and I have no desire to shake the hand of a murderer,” Bile said. “Nor would I want anyone to misunderstand the purpose of my visit, if I were to visit him, and give it a clannish spin, considering that we belong to the same bloodline, he and I. I’ve chosen to take my distance from him, not least because I want everyone to know that I do not approve of his murderous policies, precisely because The Refuge is in the territory under his nominal control.”

“Have you considered asking him to give a hand in recovering Raasta and her companion? After all, the abduction took place in the territory under his nominal control.”

“To what end?”

“You don’t think he will help?”

“I am doubtful that he will.”

“But do you think he knows of the abduction? Might he even be behind it? Or do you feel that he won’t help you in any way, knowing that you are a man of peace and he is not?”

If one’s life was made up of a million moments of truth, Jeebleh thought, his sending off the clan elders and his subsequent intervention on behalf of the Alsatian were among his momenti della verità, actions that were undeniably significant, leading, as they did, to a sea change in him. It wouldn’t do to dwell on these grave moments of truth.

At long last Bile spoke, but only to say, “I don’t know.”

“Why haven’t you been in touch with Caloosha?” Jeebleh asked.

Bile looked quizzically at Jeebleh: Had he too heard a knock on the door? A moment later, their gazes traced the tapping to a sparrow throwing its weight against the windowpane. The cat looked up expectantly. Bile rose, hesitating over whether to let the bird in or not, and then opened the window to let the sparrow decide. The bird flew in, wheeled around the room, turned, and flew off, safe.

“I wish not to have any dealings with either Strongman or Caloosha,” was all Bile was prepared to say.

“A boy murders his brutal stepfather in cold blood,” Jeebleh said. “Does such a boy, who has suffered years of cruelty at the murdered man’s hands, mourn his death? Does the son of the murdered man, a half brother to the killer, mourn the loss of a father he’s never known?”

When Bile didn’t react, Jeebleh recalled the words of Bile’s mother, couched in regret, referring to her own role in raising Caloosha. “It’s very difficult,” she had said, “to rid yourself of the monster whom you’ve given birth to yourself, fed, raised, and looked after, and then let loose on the world.” She was responding to the clan elders, who were all men, and their tendency to blame women and point to what they called “the lax side of a mother’s nature.” Caloosha had killed his stepfather, yet the clan blamed his mother for it.

HAGARR, THE MOTHER OF CALOOSHA, BILE, AND SHANTA, MARRIED THREE times. She was a strong-minded woman, and didn’t hesitate to do as she wanted. When the opportunity to go to Italy on scholarship to train as a midwife presented itself soon after the nikaax, her engagement, she went, in opposition of her future husband’s wishes. Later, when he suggested that she give up working, because he could afford to provide for her and their son, Caloosha, she refused to do so. She was one among a handful of Somali women who had finished their secondary education, and could earn their own keep, and she dreaded the thought of relying on a man’s handouts. A woman with foresight, she knew that the day wasn’t far off when her husband would look for and find a younger, prettier woman, one prepared to do a wealthy man’s bidding. And as soon as this happened, Hagarr insisted on a divorce.

She moved out of his house into that of her elder brother, where she and Caloosha, then a three-year-old, were given a room with a separate entrance. It wasn’t long before she discovered that sharing space with her sister-in-law was no easy matter. She found accommodation in a rooming house, and hired a series of young maids to look after her son. She didn’t care when society accused her of what some called “dereliction of duty as a mother.” But she was bothered when her husband threatened her with court action.

Caloosha was a very difficult child to raise. He was impossible to discipline, and he displayed unusual cruelty early on. Already at age three he was adept at throwing knives, the way you throw darts at a dartboard, though he preferred living targets. He lit matches out of mischief, nearly setting the house on fire. Many of the young women Hagarr hired to look after him left within a short time.

She had her job and made a sufficient income, but Caloosha was too great a challenge for her to raise as a single mother. So she contracted a second marriage, as she believed that the boy needed the sobering hand of a male to bring his wild, satanic cruelties under control. Within a month of the wedding, there was considerable change in Caloosha’s behavior. He was much more restrained in his dealings with the house help, and was calmer, less prone to violence. Hagarr attributed this to her husband’s calming influence. But then she discovered bruises on the boy’s body. Once his eyes were swollen shut for days, his nose bled, and his wrists and back were sore. It turned out that her husband was in the habit of tying Caloosha’s feet together and hanging him upside down. Hagarr came home from work one day and found her son hanging there. She didn’t know what to do, short of threatening her husband to move out. The trouble was, she was close to having their first child, her second. And even though he had been beaten to the point of death, Caloosha seemed to have made peace with his own and his stepfather’s violent natures. He never complained. He took the beatings “as a man.”

Caloosha was nine and in the second grade at school when he had a particularly unpleasant altercation with his stepfather. A few days later, his stepfather was found dead, a poisoned arrow stuck in his throat. Hagarr was away on night duty. According to the two sisters of the dead man, who’d shared a room with the boy, there were no untoward noises during the night. Only the following morning, when the maid knocked on their door, did they learn of their brother’s death. He was buried the same day. There was suspicion that Caloosha had shot the poisoned arrow, but there was no proof. The boy showed no outward signs of guilt.

Hagarr went to her grave believing that her son had killed her second husband. And Bile would insist, at least in public, that he bore his half brother no grudges for seeing to an early grave the man who had fathered him.

JEEBLEH AND BILE SAT WITH THE COFFEE TABLE BETWEEN THEM. JEEBLEH was studying the photographs in an album: Raasta in her mother’s arms, in her father’s, the pictures showing clearly how engaged she had been since birth. The gaze of the one-week-old followed the movements of the photographer.

Now he wanted to know what Bile’s first thoughts were when he joined Shanta and Faahiye.

“I feel embarrassed when I look back,” Bile told him. “Regrettably, I haven’t shared my shame with a living soul. It grieves me to remember what I did.”

A hush, as quiet as early-evening shadows, descended on Bile’s face. He tilted his head slightly toward Jeebleh, in the posture of a pet being stroked.

“Why is that?” Jeebleh asked.

“I wanted to touch,” Bile said.

“Just to make physical contact?” Jeebleh recollected the urge to make contact when his solitary confinement came to its abrupt end. “I remember that feeling.”

“I wanted to be touched,” Bile said, “to be held in a human embrace. The desire to touch and be touched was so great that I nearly smothered everyone I met with a hug. I’d have been one of the happiest men on earth, if someone had touched me and I had touched them, innocuously, but lovingly too.”

“How did you satisfy the urge?”

“When I look back on those days, I recall being alive, free — but alas, I lived in a house that wasn’t my house, with a sister I hardly knew, whose husband I didn’t get on with, and I had plenty of money that wasn’t mine. The first few days, I thought about my mother, who wasn’t a physical person, maybe because, as a midwife, she looked on the human body as a shoemaker looks on leather — not intimately. Shanta was a touch-touch person and, when she was young, would cuddle up to you. Caloosha was so cruel he didn’t ‘touch’ you — you know that yourself — he hurt you. Often I remembered with pleasure the women I had loved, especially the women who had touched me where I liked to be touched, and whom I touched where they liked me to touch. I was in a needy, touch-me-please mood when I met Dajaal, soon after I gained my freedom.”

“And he dropped you off at Shanta and Faahiye’s?”

“That’s right. As it happened, I walked in through the front gate and heard a moan, which had some urgency to it. Dajaal had alerted me to Shanta’s condition as soon as I introduced myself to him. I suppose the groan I heard helped make the urge to touch less important, for a while at least. And before long, I was washing my hands and rolling up my sleeves, ready to get down to work.

“I wish I had seriously considered the ethical implications of a brother delivering his younger sister’s baby, but there was no time — the lives of the mother and the baby weighed heavily in favor of an intervention, mine. These were abnormal times. There were no hospitals functioning, and I had no way of finding another doctor to help my sister. So I did what I had to, and got down to work right away, conscious of the conditions I was working in, which were far from ideal.”

“And where was Faahiye all the while?”

“He was there, all right.”

“Doing what?”

“I seem to remember that he was as nervous as an adolescent,” Bile said. Raasta was their first baby, the first for both. His anxiety grew, and he kept knocking at the door, coming in and going out, and putting sophomoric questions to me.

“I had no idea he would want to hold his baby as soon as she opened her lungs with the welcome of life. Not many Somali men would want to hold a baby soon after birth. For me, however, everything was unreal, and I took delight in touching, hugging, being touched and hugged, because I didn’t remember what I had just done — helped at the delivery of my sister’s baby, which by medical standards in our country is unethical. We quarreled over who would hold her longer.

“I hadn’t the calmness of mind to comprehend why Faahiye was fussing, or sulking, and why he was walking out of the room. Whenever I didn’t hold her, I regretted my error of judgment, regretted that I was hogging my niece’s company, and regretted that I didn’t take into account the fact that Faahiye was as eager to hold and touch the baby as I was. Only it was too late. We were two men of advanced age, one a father, the other a maternal uncle, and we were ready to fight over a baby, just born! But never in her presence.”

“And then?”

“My sister was dead to the world for much of the first day, and when she came to and held the baby, she spoke of how she had fallen under a quiet spell. We sensed calm within ourselves whenever we were close to Raasta, and if we had to fight or argue, we would go out of the room where she was. She mattered to us all, because she guaranteed our safety. She was a child born to peace, she was an alternative to attrition. She was a protected person, so anyone physically close to her would be protected too. That’s what we believed.”

Jeebleh asked, “What became of the duffel bag?”

“I had clean forgotten about it,” Bile said. “Faahiye found it in the house and confronted me, asked where I had gotten the cash. We argued, and he accused me of robbery and murder. I was at peace with myself, and my conscience was at peace with the truth, as I knew it, and I knew I was no murderer or robber. But I had a problem explaining, and felt affronted by Faahiye. I was hurt. We got off to a bad start. That was what it was. And then there was Shanta’s sickness.”

“What was the matter with her?”

“She had an acute inflammation, which worsened soon after she started breast-feeding. This led to abscesses. Within a day, her breasts were swollen, and because there was increased hardness toward their lower edges, I decided the baby should be bottle-fed. But then Faahiye forbade his daughter to be fed on powdered milk bought with looted money. Shanta told us that as a woman she didn’t want to become a victim of what she said were ‘men’s endless petty quarrels over matters she considered to be of no importance.’ To her, what mattered was that the baby had milk, not where the milk came from, or in what form. Faahiye sulked. It was all pretty horrid.”

In another long silence, the two friends looked at the cat, now busy pulling at a doll into which it had dug its powerful claws.

“SHANTA’S TROUBLE IS THAT SHE IS SHANTA!”

“What do you mean?” Jeebleh said.

“She describes herself as having her hands tied with a rope of tears. By which she means she cannot help being weepy,” Bile responded. “But she can be equally tough, and refuse to compromise. When she’s in an obstinate mood, she becomes a tit-for-tat person, and lets the world burn in its ashes.”

Bile explained how proud he was of her politics, what he called her “civic consciousness,” and how she would engage Caloosha’s politics with foolhardy courage. “Since Raasta’s disappearance, however, she’s started to demonstrate worrying signs of change. While she still despises his intimacy with the warlords, she’s moved closer to Caloosha ideologically, not least when it comes to clan politics.”

“How does Faahiye react to this?”

“He belongs to the old world! He can be deferential to a fault, at least in public,” Bile said. “But he can prove hard to take in private, reducing all Shanta’s grievances to a woman’s nagging, a naught. All the same, he behaves in an upright, old-world manner, like a man who believes in his own dignity and in the honor of the family. In contrast, she is given to outbursts, and to making a spectacle of herself in public.”

“What’s been your relationship with him?”

“We’ve been civil with each other, as in-laws, ever since he accepted my explanation of how I came by the money in the duffel bag.”

“That’s a relief.”

“We got along quite handsomely until he disappeared,” Bile said. “He and I never exchanged a harsh word over his and Shanta’s difficulties, for I saw how this was an affront to him. I stayed out of it as well as I could. I tried to intervene by speaking to my sister when things got out of hand, or when, in my presence, she behaved in an ill-mannered way.”

“How did he behave when she flipped?”

“He was very restrained.”

“Even when her behavior became unbearable?”

“There was the occasion when she made uncouth comments, described him as sex-starved, and claimed that he wanted her to ‘give’ it to him every night. I remember how he looked at her as an adult might look on a spoiled child,” Bile said.

Jeebleh said nothing.

“There’s nothing sadder than when someone you love takes leave of her senses right in front of you. Nothing as disturbing as when a well-brought-up, sane woman behaves uncontrollably badly in public.”

It was time to change the subject. “Who named her Raasta?” Jeebleh asked.

“We named her Rajo, in the belief that the girl represented every Somali’s hope. But then people misheard it as ‘Racho,’ and we didn’t want anyone to assume she was an orphan, so I nicknamed her ‘Raasta,’ on account of her dreadlocks. She was born with beautiful natural curls, which when washed, stayed as firm as jewels.”

Jeebleh remembered a detail from several articles he had read about Raasta and The Refuge, which stated that many people lived under the aegis of the dreadlocked girl. He hoped he could meet her before he left.

Bile yawned, mumbling about wanting to rise early, and Jeebleh agreed that they should turn in. But neither moved or said anything for a while. Then Jeebleh asked, “Do you think it will be possible for me to visit Shanta?”

“She’ll be happy to see you, I’m sure.”

“Maybe I can try to see her tomorrow?”

“I’ll arrange the visit,” Bile said.

17

JEEBLEH WOKE WITH A NAGGING ANXIETY ABOUT HIS IMPENDING VISIT with Shanta, worried that he might upset her more in her already weepy state. He wondered if he shouldn’t postpone the visit until more was known about the fate of the girls.

He wished more people would speak in a tongue of regrets, as Bile had suggested in his meandering way when they talked earlier, and instead of insisting that they are not to blame, would admit to their part in the collapse, to their culpability in the failure. Maybe then they would benefit from Bile’s humility, his honesty and magnanimity, these being assets in themselves, and seldom found in the same person.

There were night shadows and foreboding silences in the bedroom. He thought he had heard noises after midnight, and he wondered whether Bile had sneaked out of the apartment, like a man embarking on a dangerous mission, or a lover honoring a late appointment with a partner. He had exchanged good-night greetings with Bile soon after their conversation, ready to drop into the comforting well of a deep sleep.

The day before, he had called home and given his wife and daughters his doctored version of the truth, notable for its omissions. His wife, who knew him better, queried his decision to move south.

“I couldn’t stand staying in that hotel.”

“But you’ve often spoken of the excessive violence in the south of Mogadiscio,” his wife said. “Does it make sense for you to move there?”

Jeebleh replied with a formidable sangfroid: “I’ve moved in with Bile, that’s how I see it. What’s more important now, anyway, is that I feel safer in his company and in the setup here.”

He exchanged a few words with his daughters, to whom he offered more of the same waffle. He interpreted his action as the acceptable behavior of someone being protective toward his family. There was no reason to make them worry unnecessarily.

Jeebleh thought that he may have been woken by a ringing telephone, but he wasn’t sure. He looked at the clock — about three in the morning — and decided to get some water from the kitchen. On his way, he noticed the door to Bile’s room was wide open, and the bed empty. He thought of attaching the door chain for security, but he wasn’t sure if, or when, Bile might return. He stayed awake for quite a while, reading, then fell asleep to the sounds of the displaced families lodging in the improvised spaces below the apartment. Much later he heard a key turning as the door was gently locked from the inside, and chains and bolts being put on. He lay obstinately asleep, like a schoolchild at wake-up time. His unconscious got to work, and he had a dream in which peahens played their part in a young woman’s self-arousal. How intriguing!

At eight in the morning or thereabouts, a gentle knock on the apartment door woke him. When he came out of his room, he saw several pieces of luggage in the corridor. Probably Seamus’s, he deduced from the fact that the door to Seamus’s room was closed. So who could be knocking? When he asked who it was, Bile responded, “The breakfast man is here!”

To let Bile in, Jeebleh removed the chains, of which there were at least three, then slid back the bolts, of which there were two. He wasn’t convinced that these impediments would stop a determined man, armed and ready to shoot his way in. All the same, it took him an inordinately long time to get the hang of undoing the chains and bolts, and Bile had to instruct him what to do when he got stuck. Finally, he unlocked a padlock on which he set eyes for the first time, a lock in a class of its own, an Italian-made affair as big as a full-grown gorilla’s jaws. When he had pulled the door open and faced Bile, Jeebleh confessed that he had had no idea there was so much hardware on the door. “I doubt there is anyone in the world who’s as clumsy with bolts and chains as I am!”

“I know several people who won’t even have locks,” Bile told him, as he walked in, carrying a professionally packed takeout breakfast. “Since arriving in Mogadiscio, Seamus has developed a fad for bolts, heavy-duty locks, and chains. Being from Belfast, he’ll tell you that he knows what guns do to people, and that he’s seen it all. Which is why he refuses to keep or own guns.”

“How many bolts, how many chains, my God!”

Bile said, “When you share an apartment in a violent city, you accommodate each other’s sense of paranoia. We bolt it up, chain and lock it, because it eases Seamus’s paranoia. He refers to this”—he touched the Italian padlock, heavier than a gorilla’s head—“as the ‘humor-me padlock,’ and you can see him holding it in his lap and caressing it, as though it were a cat or a baby!”

“The choices one makes!” Jeebleh said.

“Seamus has developed another obsession.”

“What can that be?”

“He loves the sound of chains against chains, loves what he refers to as the handsome feel and sexy sight of heavy-duty padlocks. These turn him on. One of his lovers in Milan gave him the contraption as a present. When he got back to Mogadiscio, he brought it out and spoke of it in the most glowing terms. He might have been a herdsman talking of his favorite she-camel, praising her.”

“Would you say Seamus is a fetishist?”

“What do you mean?” asked Bile.

“Of chains, locks, and bolts.”

“He is.”

“What’s your take on lock, bolt, and chains?”

“When we’re together, he locks up,” Bile said, “I open up.”

Since there was a logic built into the relationship between these two bachelors, Jeebleh wondered what his job was going to be in a threesome flat share. Bile went toward the kitchen with the breakfast package, avoiding the seven pieces of luggage in the corridor.

“When did he get here?” Jeebleh asked when Bile returned.

“He rang at an ungodly hour,” Bile said, “and told me that his flight from Nairobi had landed just before dark at an airstrip in Merka, he had no idea why. He managed to get a lift from the airstrip, which is about a hundred kilometers from where we are, to a guesthouse in the north of the city. But the manager of the guesthouse had no place for him. It is a house for European Union officials visiting on short missions in Somalia. I was at a friend’s house, but Seamus managed to get me on my mobile, and I arranged for Dajaal to bring him to the house where I was. It was in the dead of a dangerous hour in Mogadiscio, close to three in the morning. Then I drove him here.”

Good breeding kept Jeebleh from asking Bile where he had spent the night, or with whom. In the old days, it was Seamus who always told you everything about his one-night stands, provided you with their first names or aliases, gave you the size of their brassieres, informed you what they liked and didn’t, how they kissed, or whether they were sloppy in bed or not. Details of Jeebleh’s own infrequent forays came out sooner or later at Seamus’s badgering. Bile, however, was unfailingly discreet; he wouldn’t tell you a thing.

Jeebleh said, “I bet Seamus won’t stir until midday.”

“Always dead to the world in the mornings, our Seamus.”

After a pause Bile asked, “Would you like an espresso?”

“If it’s homemade and by your good hands, I would. A double!”

JEEBLEH TOOK A BITE OF HIS BRIOCHE. THE HONEY RUNNING DOWN HIS chin reminded him how much he used to enjoy these delicacies. It was comforting that life had plotted to bring the three of them together again, all this time after their days in Italy, and he couldn’t help praying that they would still live in the country of their friendship.

The espresso was majestic; there was no other word to describe it. Full of vigor, stronger than the kick of a young horse. It was dark, grainy, and concentrated like a Gauloise. It reminded him of their days in Padua, and he was tempted to ask for a cigarette even though he had abandoned the habit two decades earlier. Life was young in those smoke-filled days, days full of promise, all three friends eager to make their marks on the societies they had come from. Dreaming together, the three inseparable friends, and the two women whose presence became de rigueur for Seamus and Jeebleh, smoked their lungs away, and consumed great quantities of espresso.

In those long-ago days, you would see Seamus going off lonely and alone into the darkened moments of memory, as he recalled what had happened to his family in Belfast, blown up in their own apartment, a grenade thrown through an open window from a passing car. He had lived with constant worry about sudden death. He would talk like a man deciding to forget, but not forgive. And he would remind you time and again that two brothers, a sister, and his father had died in the massacre; only he and his mother had survived, because they happened to be out. Mother Protestant, father Catholic, he had been brought up to live as inclusive a life as he could, in which sectarian differences were never privileged. And then the massacre. He was hard-pressed to know what to do. There was something in the way Seamus told the story that made Jeebleh think that he had exacted revenge. And on several occasions he had heard Seamus screaming in his sleep, “The bloody dogs are done!”

Bile now asked Jeebleh, “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, I did. I dreamt too.”

“Do you feel like sharing your dream?”

“I saw a one-eyed, five-headed, seven-armed figure,” Jeebleh told him. “Maybe you’ll help me interpret it, the way you used to.”

“Was the one-eyed figure with multiple heads dancing?”

“Yes.”

“Were there voices in the background chanting narrative sequences to the tale being mimed?”

“How have you worked out all this?”

“Just answer my question.”

“Yes.”

“And was the movement of the figure with the multiple heads extravagant, the gestures now rapid, now deliberately slow, and were the index finger and the thumb held away from the rest of the body, and the arms of the dancer shaped into a wide circle?”

“Yes again.”

Silence settled on Jeebleh, as if permanently. He remembered the calmness as he watched the figure dancing, and saw several faces known to him. He was sorry he couldn’t put any names to the faces — maybe they were from an earlier life, now forgotten.

“Was the figure garlanded and in costume?”

“Y-e-s!”

“Hindu deities have a way of presenting themselves in movement,” Bile said, “some boasting an enormous headgear and the costume to go with it, others arriving while riding a rat. I’m thinking of Ganesh, whose intercession is sought whenever a Hindu embarks on a journey or an enterprise, whose potbellied image, with an elephant trunk and tusks and shiny countenance, is paramount at the entrance to a great number of temples.” Bile rubbed his palms together excitedly and asked with a grin, “Was there a peacock?”

“There was a peahen!”

“Not a peacock?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you saw Mira in your dream — a peahen!”

“Mira?”

“Miss Mira Meerut,” Bile said. “Our — that’s to say, Seamus’s — Mira from the city of Meerut, India, possibly the most beautiful woman to join our tables in Padua. She was in love with Seamus.”

Jeebleh’s ears throbbed, the skin tightening, the rhythm unnerving, his heart beating faster and faster. “Mira wasn’t from India,” he corrected. “She was of Indian origin, all right, but she was from Burma.”

Bile agreed that she may have been traveling on a Burmese passport when they met her, but she was from southern India, culturally speaking. Her parents had migrated from Gujarat, in western India.

“She was the one who brought along a couple of exquisite woodcarvings,” Jeebleh said. “I remember those.”

“That’s right,” Bile confirmed. “She was besotted with Seamus, who, in turn, was besotted with the carvings. The figure he fell for was caught in the process of movement. Such a vivid rhythm, I recall. We had it on our mantelpiece in the apartment in Padua.”

“I remember that there were carvings,” Jeebleh said, “but my memory of that particular carving is vague.”

“She was a beauty,” Bile said. “She wore peacock feathers and what a train of sari colors, of a silk I’ve never seen anywhere else. I was smitten with her too, but I dared not speak of it. She was breathtakingly beautiful, irresistibly charming, her almond eyes exceptionally large and in constant motion. I can’t believe you don’t remember her. Miss Mira Meerut moved about with a large following of admirers. She was like a peacock with a harem of peahens. Until she met Seamus.”

Mira’s father, Bile related, was a diplomat based in Rome — or was he with a UN agency? In addition to her striking beauty, she was also a first-class brain. She was ready for her finals, when her parents made her withdraw from the university because she was pregnant. Bile took this personally, because he was the only person in whom Seamus had confided that he was the baby’s father. To intercede on her behalf, and ask that she be allowed at least to take her finals, Bile presented himself at Mira’s parents’ apartment. An Italian woman opened the door when he rang the bell, and told him she was the new tenant. Bile learned that Mira and her parents had left the country, precise date unknown. He found this difficult to believe, and he walked from room to room in the apartment, hoping that somehow he would find Mira or her parents. The only trace of her he discovered was a drawing of a peacock in green-and-blue blossom, with a cropped tail. Bile took ill, and barely passed his exams that year. “And guess what?” Bile asked.

“What?”

Bile faltered as he spoke. “Mira Meerut was here in Mogadiscio less than two years ago, as a UNICEF consultant. She was the mother of two children, and the happy wife of a man several years her junior, an American. She was stunningly pretty, but not as free-spirited and wide-eyed with wonder as when we met her. She had resigned herself to being the ordinary wife of an ordinary American financier, on whom she doted. And when she and Seamus met, they had a ball remembering the good times, and even enjoyed recalling the bad times, the very depressing moments. But she wasn’t at all pleased to learn from Seamus that he had left the woodcarving in storage in New York, and didn’t take it along everywhere he went.”

“How fortunate that her tour of duty here coincided with Seamus’s presence,” Jeebleh said. “I bet it was wonderful for you to see a train of saris and to relive the past.”

“She was deeply hurt, though.”

“And she didn’t hide it?”

Bile shook his head no.

“How did you figure out my dream?”

Bile said, “You may not have remembered it for what it was, because there’s a photograph of Mira, taken by Seamus, on the wall in Raasta’s room. You probably saw it before you fell asleep, and the image of this stunning woman in motion insinuated itself into your dream. She still loves Seamus!”

“It is possible that my deep unconscious also became aware of Seamus’s presence in the apartment. Maybe the dream is in part a recognition of his arrival, a welcome event.”

And suddenly Seamus was there: in full flesh, grinning.

18

JEEBLEH’S EYES WERE TOUCHED WITH A SMILE THAT SPREAD SIDEWAYS to his cheeks and down to his chin. Seamus’s eyes, like a falcon’s, were a dark brown, the pupils hardly visible.

Jeebleh held his breath in suspense, waiting to hear which language Seamus would speak. When they met last, in Padua, they used Italian. Would Seamus, knowing that Jeebleh had now lived in the United States for close to twenty years, choose English? In those long-gone days in Italy, the world had been in flux, but now things were very different, and they were meeting in Mogadiscio; both were keenly aware of this.

“We’re all jumpy, aren’t we?” Seamus had chosen English.

Jeebleh guessed from his tone of voice that Seamus would not lapse into some piss-elegant Irish English as he used to. He had lived in England during his teens, then had gone on to Cambridge, where he had taken his first degree. And he had spent time in Italy, France, and Egypt.

“Understandably jumpy,” Jeebleh agreed.

Seamus came closer and said, “Never you mind, we’ll sort it out.” He opened his arms wide. “But let me give you a good, warm welcome hug to comfort you!”

Seamus was a well-built, beer-drinking man. He was as tall as he was wide, and sported a liberally grown beard, the kind a devout Sikh might wear to a temple on a Guru’s remembrance day and be showily proud of. He had beady eyes, bloodshot red, and thin arms that made his wrists appear scraggy. Physically, he had changed greatly since he and Jeebleh had last met. Younger, of course, and handsomer then, he had been much leaner too, clean-shaven and with a waist that might have been the envy of many a model. But Jeebleh would have recognized him anywhere, despite his girth.

Jeebleh let go first, so as to hold his friend at a look-and-see distance, and eventually to hug him yet again, even if briefly and more for effect.

Bile, who had been standing nearby, watching the goings-on, now sneaked out of the apartment. Neither friend paid him mind.

“Mogadiscio has been awful to you!” Seamus said.

Jeebleh noted a characteristic of Seamus’s that hadn’t changed: he exploded into a room, like a missile arriving on the quiet and detonating with a rush of excitement. His entry today was not as dramatic as it used to be, and he was quieter on the whole, growing only moderately louder the more he spoke. Would he make his usual sharp, insightful comments? Jeebleh, who associated him with an impressive presence, wore a wary expression, similar to that of a dog on whose pee-marked territory a wily cat has begun to trespass.

“My clansmen have been awful.”

Seamus went to the kitchen to make coffee, and Jeebleh followed. Seamus had unkempt fingernails, edgily bitten and dirty. His toenails were long, so long they put Jeebleh in mind of a museum postcard of a Neanderthal man in all his excessive wildness, as imagined and drawn by a modern illustrator. Jeebleh guessed that his wife’s remarks about unruly toenails would have cut Seamus to the quick, and made him deal with their disorderliness. Maybe he could grow his fingernails and toenails as long as he pleased because he wasn’t sharing his life or his bed with a partner.

“Bile’s told me how they behaved, your clansmen,” Seamus said. “What a repulsive lot! Fancy asking you to pay for the repairs of their war machine. Do they think you are a warlord? They don’t know you as well as some of us think we do. But what cheek!”

“I told them off.”

“Glad you told them to sod off!” Seamus was getting a little excited, and louder. “I know how you feel. I told mine off, whingers the lot of them. I told them to naff off, the moaners. I was a little tyke then, and I haven’t lived in Ireland since, because of my family. How I hate whingers. But you want to know what I think? I think you must be careful next time you meet any of them, if there is a next time. They’ll stick a knife in your back, easy as taking a toffee from a baby. They’re all plunderers, every single one of them. But then, you know that, don’t you?”

“I do!” Jeebleh agreed.

“And they bury you fast here,” Seamus said.

“Don’t worry. I won’t let them.”

“Good for you!”

“I refuse to die. My family wouldn’t want me buried here. My wife is an American, you know, and calls this place ‘a jerkwater of a ruin.’ I’ve other responsibilities elsewhere, a loving family to love.”

“Glad to hear it.”

There was a brief pause.

Jeebleh said, “It’s lovely to see you.”

“You know what pisses me off?” Seamus said.

“Tell me.”

“What pisses me off no end is how easily they dispense with the formality of a postmortem. They cart you off and away with the enthusiasm of a two-pot screamer heading for the pub, murmuring a few verses. I won’t stand for any of that. I’ve drawn up my will, and Bile has a notarized copy of it in the event of anything unexpected. I don’t wish to be planted in the earth fast. In fact, the mere thought of it kills me. I’ve provided Bile with a pile of cash locked in the safe. I want to be flown out of here, with the leisured slowness of an Irishman, and I want a wake and lots of drinking and feasting. That’s what I want!”

Then all at once, he wore an expression that Jeebleh didn’t know how to interpret. He remembered Seamus’s charming cheekiness, his posturing, his clowning.

“How’s your mother?” Jeebleh asked.

Seamus looked sad, and exhausted from jet lag. The color rose in his cheeks, and he said, “She’s tough as nails, and obstinately holding on. Thanks for asking.” His eyes dimmed and after a pause he said, “Sorry about yours. Please accept my belated condolences.”

Jeebleh looked steadily at Seamus as he poured coffee from the espresso machine into two cups, then passed one over. “Tell me your latest,” he said, “and then let’s work our way back to when we last met.”

“I’ve just come from Ireland,” Seamus said, obliging, “with a duffel bag of money to top up what Bile and I had between us, so we can keep The Refuge going until we run out of charity money again. As you can see, we’re all fine, may God help us, and the fat is not in the fire yet! We’re optimistic, despite the disappearance of our dearest, Raasta and Makka.”

“I’m not sure Bile’s told me how you got here the first time,” Jeebleh said. “If he has, I don’t remember. Anyway, he and I still have to catch up with each other. It is a bit of a blur, all that I’ve learned. So why Mogadiscio?”

Seamus was so still that Jeebleh thought he had seen a green-eyed fairy. “My life was gathering dust,” he said, “cobwebs forming in the corners, because of my nine-to-five job. The more the dust gathered, the more fits of uglies I had. I traveled a lot, but my travels were always work-related. I would spend a week in New York, two in Bangkok, a couple of days in Melbourne, then a month in New York, and another in Nairobi, always traveling and always working. I was in terrific demand as a simultaneous interpreter, and the pay was top-notch. I couldn’t complain about being everyone’s favorite, but it was getting to me.”

“What’s wrong with pegging away at work?”

“I hated becoming a gun for hire,” Seamus said. “You’ll remember I speak seven languages that are understood in areas of the world held apart by the guttural, the tonal, the diphthong, and other tongue-twisting differences. Well, I was on the road for long stretches of time. I made pots of money, but that wasn’t good enough, and I was on the verge of freaking out. I was lonely, and my life felt as though it had no purpose.”

Jeebleh said, “What passport do you travel on?”

“British.”

“Your loyalty lies with Britain or Ireland?”

A lightning sense of humor flashed in Seamus’s eyes, and he grinned. When Jeebleh looked at him, puzzled, Seamus said, “Funny you should ask that.”

Jeebleh waited patiently. In Padua, Seamus used to describe himself as “a colonial”! And since he was at a loss to find an equivalent word in Italian, he would often just use the English, and explain it to those who had no idea what he was talking about.

Now he said, “My loyalties do not lie with the Union Jack, for sure. Mine’s an all-inclusive Irish loyalty, with a good measure of cosmopolitanism. The idea of owing allegiance to a country is foreign to me.”

“You haven’t answered, Why Mogadiscio?”

“Because Mogadiscio was there, in Africa!”

“What about Mogadiscio? What about Africa?”

“I used to donate a little more than a third of my earnings to charities in Africa, when cobwebs laden with the memories of a spider started to waylay me. Thinking of our friendship and our closeness turned to Africa into a cause. For me, Africa became my cause!”

“You never thought of Ireland that way?”

“No. I ruined Ireland for myself a long time ago, did some things there I couldn’t go back and live with.”

“And what might that have been?”

Seamus’s eyes dodged, and his conversation followed. “Mogadiscio seemed to be the ideal place for me.”

“Hiding out with warlords and mercenaries?” Jeebleh countered jokingly.

“And Bile too! But yes, you’re right.

“I was on the run most of the time anyhow,” Seamus said, after a silence, “spending a week on a curry-and-chow-mein tour, Delhi for a weekend, Hong Kong for a day. This wasn’t work, but run, run, and run, a lifestyle with no room for reflection, a life meaninglessly held together by a major absence: love! I’m not speaking of loving a woman or a man, don’t misunderstand me, but of a good, plain, old-fashioned, sixties-style personal commitment to love.”

“And what have you found coming here? Love?”

“Will you forgive a cliché?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve run into my self, coming here.”

“Is this good or bad?”

“There’s a purpose to my life now: Raasta!”

Then he was back to when he decided to come to Mogadiscio: how he bought the New York Times Sunday edition at midnight, in San Francisco; how he read about a UN-funded job in Somalia; how he applied; how he was short-listed; and how he was selected. He packed lightly, convinced that he would hate it. But he didn’t. He met Bile—“It was more like running into my self”—and Raasta; he stayed. “Perhaps there’s some truth in the wisdom that there is no happiness sweeter than the happiness built on someone else’s sorrow. And this city has enough sorrow, with much deeper foundations.”

“That’s how Mogadiscio has struck you?”

Seamus replied, “Mogadiscio, because of Raasta, is what a straw dripping with water is to a man dying of thirst. I’m aware of the fact that it’s a death trap, and because of this my heart goes out to those who’re caught up in the fighting, and those who cannot help losing themselves in its politics. I am here to stay, that’s what matters.”

“And the cobwebs?”

“Vamoose!”

Jeebleh wished he could say that about himself. But then, he hadn’t come to sweep clean the corners of his life that had grown dustier from neglect. And while eluding death, he would lay his mother’s troubled soul to rest. He knew this was a tall order, but worth trying.

“Tell me about yourself,” Seamus said. “Why are you in Mogadiscio?”

“I’ve come to ennoble my mother’s memory.”

Seamus knew that there were occasions when it was best not to say anything, not to even bother with condolences, because there are no words with which to express one’s sentiments satisfactorily. He had heard a great deal about the mothers of Jeebleh and Bile, but it was difficult for him to imagine them alive, a lot easier to think of them as dead. He had a vague memory of some controversy to do with Jeebleh’s letters, but Seamus wasn’t sure if Caloosha had been involved, and in what capacity. He seemed to remember it was Shanta who had spilled the beans on this aspect of the controversy.

“How do you plan to achieve that?” Seamus asked.

“I’m working on it.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Thank you.”

Seamus now had a disheveled expression as he asked, “Have you seen Caloosha, since coming?”

“I’ve seen him. Have you?”

“I haven’t had the desire to meet him ever,” Seamus said. “The things I’ve heard about him haven’t encouraged me to.”

“I met him briefly, that’s all.”

“And Shanta?”

“Not yet, but I plan to.”

Jeebleh looked at his right hand, palm up, and stared at where the heart line veered toward his middle finger. He asked, “Have you met Af-Laawe?”

After some reflection, Seamus said, “Af-Laawe, the Marabou, is sure to discover the whereabouts of the dead, in whatever state they’re in. I would seek him out if I hadn’t any idea in which of the many cemeteries someone was buried. The man’s death instinct contrasts well with Bile’s life instinct.”

“What do you think about him?”

“He gives me the shudders.”

As the conversation paused again, Jeebleh remembered their youthful, energetic days, when to pass the time they took turns completing each other’s unfinished sentences. When they engaged each other in that kind of banter, fellow students who joined them found it difficult to keep up. Often, even the languages changed — from Italian to English, then perhaps to Arabic. Toward the end of their stay in Padua, Seamus had picked up the basics of Somali.

Jeebleh would have to run a fever of nerves before reintroducing the seesawing games of their younger days in Italy. Most likely, it wouldn’t work here, in troubled Somalia. He asked, “Did you come to Mogadiscio before or after the Marines landed?”

“I arrived in Mogadiscio in 1992,” Seamus said. “I was head of an advance team charged with assessing the needs of the United Nations offices. I was to set up the translation units. The UN intervention was estimated to cost more than one hundred million U.S. dollars for that year alone. We put up a guesthouse, which doubled as our office. Because we hadn’t the authority to hire any local staff, New York imported Somalis with American passports. And you had old British colonial officers running the show: former BBC staffers, chummy with the former dictator, who served as consultants to the UN. I remember an Englishman who kept yattering at me about clan warfare, and how the combined efforts of the U.S. and the UN would sort out the mess. Sod it, it was utter rubbish. Left to me. I would’ve committed the lot to a nuttery, the self-serving imbeciles.”

“How did you and Bile meet?”

“I shared a table at the guesthouse with an Italian-American woman who was on an advance mission to open the UNICEF office,” Seamus said. “She mentioned his name in passing. I looked him up. It wasn’t difficult to find him.”

“Was he living alone then?”

“He was spending a lot of time at Shanta’s, with Raasta, even though he was living in shoddy settings. He had the bare minimum when I first visited him. We talked, and he shared some of his visions with me, visions that took a different form every time we met.” As he spoke, Seamus bit at his fingernails, to the flesh, at times making it difficult for Jeebleh to understand what he was saying.

“Did you recognize each other when you met?”

“He didn’t recognize me,” Seamus said.

“Because of the beard?”

“I hadn’t grown one then.” He looked into Jeebleh’s eyes, as if focusing on some distant horizon, and then sipped his coffee.

“You didn’t expect him to recognize you?”

“For one thing, my name would’ve been the furthest thing from his mind,” Seamus said. “Also, the civil war had had a disorienting effect on him — he was concentrating on minimal survival. But he recognized my voice the moment I spoke a full sentence.

“I went to visit him at The Refuge. He was quieting a toddler who was having a convulsive crying fit. The girl fell silent on seeing me come closer, and from the way she stared at me, you might have thought she knew me from somewhere else. She rose to her full height and wobbled away, past me, up to the new playhouse, where Raasta was playing with blocks.”

“And then?”

“A thousand memories were condensed into a giant singular memory, which dwarfed all others, and I recited a verse from Dante’s Inferno, in which enslaved Somalia was a home of grief, a ship with no master that was floundering in a windstorm.”

“Then he recognized you?”

“And I stayed to help at The Refuge.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that!”

“What else?” Jeebleh asked.

“I don’t know why I thought about olives then — olive fruits, olive trees, and olive wood,” Seamus said. “Or why my mind went quietly about its thoughts in the way bees go contentedly about their motion, each droning note resulting from the previous one. I had no idea if the thought about olives came to me because we had been in Italy when we last met. Or if the fine polish of Bile’s smooth skin reminded me of olive leaves, dark green on one side, silvery on the other. It could be that I was comparing our friendship to the olive tree. Because when the top branches die, a fresh trunk with a new lease on life emerges. And the tree bears fruit between the ages of five to ten years, and may not reach full maturity until after twenty!”

Thinking about friendship and about olives and their fruits, Jeebleh recalled the times they had been through as friends, and asked himself where he had heard the phrase “the country of our friendship,” and decided that Bile had spoken the words; now the image Seamus used to describe his and Bile’s friendship was an olive tree. When he turned to his friend to ask, Seamus’s eyelids were like moths at rest, leisurely wrapping their wings over their bodies, in contented contemplation of their own mortality.

“And then what?” Jeebleh said.

“Raasta took to me,” Seamus said.

“Right away?”

“She consented to sit on my lap the first time I invited her. It was love at first sight, mutual.”

“What of Faahiye?”

“I didn’t meet him until after my third visit. And when I did, I had the feeling that there was something wrong, and that he and Shanta had ballsed up their marriage. I could see that was affecting Raasta in a negative way. I worked out for myself that Faahiye was the primary source of the discord.”

“What was Raasta like?”

“She was very striking.”

“Because of the dreadlocks?”

“Actually, you might have assumed she was Bile’s daughter if you hadn’t known, because of the family resemblance. Also, she was very comfortable around him. They touched a lot, the two of them, they touched all the time.” Tears filled Seamus’s eyes.

“And when you eventually got to know Faahiye?”

“He made me think of a tree that has never flowered,” Seamus said. “You might think he was from another, older world. He took everything personally, and because of this, he hurt easily.”

Not knowing what else to say, but wanting to make a remark, Jeebleh said, “I hope the girls are unhurt.”

Seamus, looking exhausted, covered his mouth and yawned. “Is there anything I can do for you before I go back to bed?” he asked.

“Could you give me directions to Shanta’s?”

Seamus obliged, then returned to his room.

19

BRIDGES SEPARATE THE TWO SIDES THEY JOIN, JEEBLEH THOUGHT, AS HE took long, eager strides on the way to Shanta’s. He kept consulting the mass of squiggles passing for a map that Seamus had drawn as though from bad memory. Now he came to a stop, and looked this way and that, and then at the piece of paper, which he held at trombone distance. He had forgotten to bring along his reading glasses. With no prominent landmarks to guide him, and no street names either, he was unable to determine whether some of the asterisks represented two- or three-story buildings reduced to rubble or crossroads. Was he to turn left here, go a hundred meters or so, then turn right at the next destroyed building? He went on nonetheless, with the confidence of a man who knows where he is headed.

A hungry dog, its emaciated tail between its skinny legs, followed him. It kept a safe distance, its nose close to the ground, but its eyes focused mainly on him. The dog was on full canine alert, Jeebleh noted, ready to take off at the slightest hint of threat. It stopped and waited whenever he paused to take another look at the piece of paper, and didn’t move until after he had resumed walking. Jeebleh relived the incident with the Alsatian. He hadn’t thought he would get into trouble or risk being shot at if he stepped in to prevent a spoiled brat, the son of some minor warlord, from torturing a dog. He hadn’t counted on having to deliver the puppies, but he was glad he had been there.

With the bush dog still following, Jeebleh came upon several sick-looking goats. Then he saw a cow taking famished bites of a plastic bag and swallowing it, and watched as she coughed, like someone with a chest ailment. After this, he saw two elderly men lifting their sarongs until they showed their bare bottoms, preparing to defecate in full view of the road. When he had lived here, this behavior would have earned a reprimand or an immediate fine if someone from the municipality had seen them emptying their bowels.

A little later, he and his canine companion came upon a throng of men gathered around something on the ground. Jeebleh decided this was a curious crowd, and not likely to turn into a mob. But why were some of them bearing clubs and others firearms? Was it for self-protection? He could see the men concentrating on the same spot and pointing. Was it a corpse, the carcass of a dead goat or some other, more unusual animal? Before getting any closer, he made sure that he knew where the hungry dog was, worried that he might be held responsible if it bit someone, or went berserk at the sight of a corpse or a carcass. He stopped within reach of the dog, just in case he was forced to intervene.

What distinguished him from the men in the crowd, apart from the fact that he had neither a club nor a firearm, was that they were all wearing sarongs. He had on trousers.

The men made space for him, and he moved forward with the mindset of a man prepared for peril, all the while wondering whether it was wise to enter what might be a trap set to lure strangers like him into it. And yet he went forward. All at once a man with a prominent gap in his upper teeth blocked his path.

“Are you a doctor?” GapTooth demanded.

“I am not.”

Heads turned and stared, and many of those at the back of the crowd craned their necks to see. Were the men more interested in him than in the man who lay unconscious on the dusty ground, his body in a tortured posture, folded into his sarong? GapTooth volunteered the information that the man on the ground had just had an epileptic seizure. “But no one in this neighborhood knows him, or knows where he comes from or why he has had an attack and fallen right where he is lying.”

Jeebleh assumed that GapTooth had advised everyone in the crowd to keep a safe distance from the epileptic, a meter at least. But he was not saying anything of the kind to Jeebleh.

There was a rawness about the way the crowd looked at the fallen man, who lay unconscious, his eyes scarily wide open, his legs apart, and his lips traced with dried saliva. A tall, bald man standing to Jeebleh’s left wondered aloud if there was a divine purpose to the presence, in their midst, of an epileptic. This set several of the men to talk all at once. BaldMan intervened, hushing them, and said, “If there is a divine message, what is it? That we’re out of control? Handicapped? Brain-dead? Stuck in some state where we’re neither living nor dead?”

Those present turned themselves into a debating society, with several men reacting viscerally to what BaldMan had said. It seemed he was someone they listened to, even if his pronouncements were meant to be provocative, or downright offensive to many there. The talk shifted from the epileptic as a divine message to Jeebleh’s presence among them.

GapTooth, pointing at Jeebleh, said to BaldMan, “But what of this man, here? Do we know who he is? Is it a matter of time before he falls sick and drops forehead first into a heap of nervous disorder? Will his eyes begin rolling, his teeth clench, and will his tongue stiffen like a bridle in a horse’s mouth? Will his breathing become noisy, will froth run with the blood coming out of his mouth? Will he fall into a convulsive fit, lie unconscious on the ground, and when he opens his eyes, not recognize any of us? Will he remember our conversation? Will he die mysteriously, leaving the problem of where to bury him? I would say that the man lying unconscious on the ground, whom we are shunning, has more things in common with us than this newly arrived stranger here, who is upright, on his feet, and apparently healthy, walking through here in his trousers with his mangy dog. It is this man we should be worried about!”

Heads turned back and forth, eyes focused now on Jeebleh, now on the epileptic. Two possible scenarios came to Jeebleh’s mind, in instantaneous reconfiguration. In one, the crowd turned into a mob. In the other, he was taking part in a TV game show in which the contestants pressed buzzers when they were ready to answer.

GapTooth asked, “If you’re not a doctor and you’re not sarong-wearing, and you do not suffer from epilepsy, then who are you?”

Trusting his instinct, he replied, “I am a guest.”

“Of the epileptic?” asked GapTooth.

“No, I am Bile’s guest!”

“Bile, the doctor?”

“That’s right.”

“Have Raasta and Makka been found, then?” GapTooth said.

“Who are they talking about?” someone called out from the fringes of the crowd. “What manner of name is Raasta? It is not Muslim, not even Somali.”

“Have you not heard of the Protected One?” someone next to him said.

“I haven’t had the pleasure,” the man said.

Before Jeebleh could speak, another man stepped forward. “The trouser-wearing stranger in our midst is new to the city, as you can obviously see. But at least he is no enemy and no threat to us, if he is Bile’s guest. And I am sure most of you have heard of the Protected One, Bile’s niece, and the Simple One, both missing for a while now. Unless you do not listen to the BBC Somali Service?”

Another man admitted to not having heard of Raasta.

“A pity you haven’t had the luck to meet either the Protected One or the Simple One,” GapTooth said rather theatrically. Jeebleh couldn’t tell whether some of them were teasing one another, as friends do. They could’ve been actors manqué, for all he knew, performing an impromptu play, staged for the benefit of anyone who happened to be passing.

With his hand extended to Jeebleh, GapTooth said, “Please remember me to the kind doctor when you see him next. And I hope, for our sake, that we find Raasta healthy and unharmed.”

“What’s your name, so I can give it to Bile?”

“Alas, I have no name by which I wish to be known in these terrible times,” GapTooth said, “nor do I answer to my old name, because of the associations it has for me nowadays. Possibly, the good doctor would know who I was if I resorted to my former name, but I would rather wait until peace has come to stay.”

“I understand,” Jeebleh said, even if he didn’t.

At the mention of Bile’s name, the crowd had begun to relax, and so had Jeebleh. But he reminded himself that it was when you dropped your guard that someone could hurt you. He imagined panic descending on him in the unlikely form of a faint heart, his own. Then he felt ill at ease, and began perspiring, until the sweat soaked through his shirt, and his back became too wet for comfort. He kept his panic under check, even though he was short of breath and nervous. Finally he plucked up enough courage and then knelt to check on the epileptic. A man with a front-row view of the spectacle asked if there was nothing he could do for the poor man.

BaldMan asserted, “If I haven’t said it before: We do not bother with people we do not know!”

“But he’s a human being just like you and me!” Jeebleh shouted, whirling to his feet. “He needs to be taken to a hospital. Why do you need to know his clan family before you help him? What’s wrong with you? You make me sick, all of you! Out of my way, please.”

The crowd stepped back fast, clearing a large circle around Jeebleh and the unconscious man, only to close in shortly, gawking. The hungry dog, which no one had bothered to shoo away, stood nearby, waiting and watching. As Jeebleh glared at them, he assumed that many in the crowd thought he had suddenly gone mad, and might harm them. In the quiet that followed, as they gathered around him in the attitude of spectators assembling for the timeless pleasure of it, he knelt down again.

It seemed that the epileptic had started to undress before losing his consciousness and falling. His hands a little unsteady, Jeebleh rearranged the man’s sarong as well as the circumstances would permit, and straightened his legs. But he had no idea what to do next. So he took the man’s head in his hands, believing that this would help release the pressure of his teeth on his tongue.

The crowd came closer, their expressions changing from barefaced indifference to total concern. When the epileptic stirred in an agitated way, the spectators, thrown into a mix of fear, shock, and relief, fell back, some invoking several of Allah’s designations, others remaining silent with the panic overwhelming their hearts. Jeebleh, oblivious of their doings, tugged at the epileptic’s limbs one at a time, until the sick man responded with a tremor, like the fury of a madman unchaining himself. The epileptic shook so violently that Jeebleh had difficulty holding him on the ground.

It was in this moment of despondency that Jeebleh heard first the voice of a woman and then a car door being opened and closed. Was he conjuring things, imagining the words “Let go, let go”? When he looked up and found his eyes boring into Bile’s, he relaxed his grip. Finally he let go, happy to leave the epileptic in the capably professional hands of Bile, who would know what to do.

Now he sensed Shanta’s discreet, caring presence. She was saying to him, in the voice of a parent to a frightened child, “Come with me, then.”

Taking a moment to look at her, he was surprised by her unimposing beauty, diminished as it was by her overall expression, which was suggestive of mourning. She was tactful despite the awkwardness of their encounter. It wasn’t lost on him that someone always came to his assistance whenever he committed himself to a clumsy act. Now it was Bile and Shanta’s turn to help deal with the problem. He felt like a mischievous child who kept getting into trouble. Perhaps the time would come when he would run out of people to offer him a lifeline.

“Tell me everything!” Shanta said. But she didn’t even listen. Instead, she led him by the hand, away from where the epileptic had collapsed.

That the hungry dog was gone was a relief to him.

THEY HAD WALKED SCARCELY TWENTY METERS WHEN HIS SENSES AWOKE TO the pervasive smell of excrement and the rotten odor of waste. Shanta’s questions helped take his mind off the overwhelming smell. “Tell me about the dog!” she said.

“Which dog?”

She linked her arm to his and kept pace with his slow gait. “Tell me about the dog and the cruel boy in fancy clothes.”

He told it to her in a short form.

She said, “Has it occurred to you that you cannot be good in a conscientious way in a city in which people are wicked and murderous through and through?”

He let that pass without comment.

“Now tell me about the elders!”

Again, he gave her an abbreviated version.

She said, “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

“What have I done?”

She wondered aloud whether he realized that he was rubbing pepper and salt on the communal wound, reminding them of their human failures. She pointed out that the source of his problem was fundamentally this: He always occupied the moral high ground. She added, “Because of this, you had to be humbled.”

He was having difficulty breathing, not because the smells were new to him — they weren’t — but because they had become even more overpowering. People living in such vile conditions were bound to lose touch with their own humanity, he thought; you couldn’t expect an iota of human kindness from a community coexisting daily with so much putrefaction. Maybe this was why people were so cruel to one another, why they showed little or no kindness to one another, and why they were blind to the needs of a bitch in labor or an epileptic in a convulsive seizure.

They came upon crows partaking of a spread of carrion. Three or four of these grotesque birds separated themselves from their colleagues and caught up with Shanta and Jeebleh in their leisurely walk. Bolder than he remembered them, the crows scoured the road ahead, hopping forward, then slowing down, like dogs on an afternoon stroll with their masters. The crows could equally have been bodyguards, assigned to escort dignitaries across a dangerous terrain. Shanta strode ahead as if unaware of the birds’ presence, even when they flew into the air, in an attempt to keep pace, and croaked reproachfully overhead. They might have been hungry children urging their parents to take them home and feed them.

Jeebleh and Shanta came to a locked gate. Shanta bent down and worried a stone out of its position in a nearby wall. Her hand came away, palm up, maybe to show she had no key in it. The gate opened. Jeebleh recalled how often the city’s residents had to fall back on their own ingenuity. How on earth do you open an automatic gate when electricity is intermittent? People had to find inventive ways of activating electric gates manually, and find them they did. On closer scrutiny, he saw that Shanta had pulled at a string hidden in the wall, to release the gate. There!

She let him go past and pushed the gate shut, then slid the bolt up into the metal frame. As they went on, past what had been the front garden of a two-story house, his sixth sense told him that someone was pointing a gun from the upper floor. He was beginning to feel unsteady in the knees, when he saw a small boy training a toy gun on him. Did the boy belong in the house, and if so, who was he? Was he a squatter, a dangerous species camping in a redoubt? He followed Shanta into the living room, and remained standing and looking around.

“Tea?” she asked.

“Without sugar, please.”

She suggested that he sit in the chair she indicated, and went to prepare tea. He made himself comfortable and took in the contents of the living room. He guessed that a child had occupied the center stage of life in the house, a child whose presence determined the shape of things in it. But the toys were all pushed out of the way into a corner, treated without much regard, abandoned. They made Jeebleh think of the provisional nature of a child’s play left unfinished, after the flagrant defilement of peace.

He couldn’t tell from the contents of the house whether its original occupants had fled before their lives were cut short. From all indications, though, the place had been home to people of different ages, backgrounds, and professional interests, at different times. He deduced this from the titles of the books on the shelves, books now in disorder. One of the former occupants might have been an architect, another a nurse. Several others, younger in age, must have been high school students, some at the Egyptian secondary school, some at the Italian liceo classico, others at Benaadir, where the medium of instruction was English — in short, a house of polyglots.

“Here we are,” Shanta said, “tea and nibbles!”

20

“LITTLE RAASTA FELT SHE FIGURED OUT FOR HERSELF WHAT MARRIAGE IS like, when she was only four,” said Shanta — given name Shan-Karoon, meaning “better than any five girls anywhere”—her voice drenched with emotion.

She faced him with the demure posture of a woman entertaining a potential in-law. Why was she ill at ease? Her clothes weren’t a mess. In fact, she was smartly dressed. All the same, there was something about her that disturbed him. But he couldn’t say what.

She would have been much younger when he was bundled out of the country. For all he knew, a lot of terrible things about which she spoke to no one, not even Bile, might have happened to her. He was on edge, like a man daring to stand on wet soap. He asked, “How did Raasta manage that?”

“You would know if you’d met her,” she said.

“But I haven’t!” He gave her a sharp glance, and the wells of her eyes filled with tears. He couldn’t tell how she managed to contain them precisely where she liked them, brimming on her lashes. He insisted: “In what way did Raasta work out what marriage is like, at the age of four?”

Like a bird feeding, Shanta moved her lips soundlessly. He sensed then that talking to her would to be an undertaking that needed special skills. She was likely to be evasive when it came to Faahiye, and might be given to improvising or making up stories too. He wouldn’t put it past her to make unsubstantiated innuendos, as many spouses might, when, in self-justification, they talked about their partners. She had trained as a lawyer, and joined the law firm set up together with several colleagues, including Faahiye. She had practiced her profession until the country collapsed into total lawlessness.

Now she spoke when he least expected her to, and, instead of answering his question, changed the subject: “Bless the house that our mothers built. Please accept my condolences over the death of our mothers.”

“Would you know how to locate Mother’s grave?”

“I’m sure I would,” she said.

But he was not one hundred percent certain she had understood that he was referring to his mother, not hers, and was sorry that he had not been clearer. He waited for her to speak; he didn’t wish to be the one to draw attention to this lapse.

Obliging, she indicated that she had gotten his meaning. “I planted two trees at our mothers’ graves,” she said. “For the unparalleled sweetness of its fruit, I planted a mango tree of the Hinducini variety, imported from India, at your mother’s grave, and a lemon tree at my mother’s. I also placed four medium-to-large stones with your mother’s name written on them. I haven’t been to her grave — or my mother’s — for quite some time, but if I put my mind to it, I am quite sure I’ll find it, no problem at all. We can ask Dajaal to take us there, if you want me to come. He’s useful in that department, and can find anything.”

“You wouldn’t know how to find her housekeeper?”

“Why do you want to find her?”

“Because I would like to know all I can about the old woman’s last days,” he said. “It is important that I talk to her. I have a number of questions that only she might be in a position to answer.”

“I’m afraid I’ve no idea where she might be.”

It was his turn to commiserate with her over the disappearance of Raasta and her companion. And because she snuffled, he felt shut out by the new circle that she now drew around herself. He was relieved that she knew how to locate his mother’s grave if all else failed, and sorry he couldn’t share all he had been told about Raasta’s possible abductors. He intended to talk to her about his plans for his mother: to construct a noble memory for her in some way, gather a few sheikhs to speak words of blessing in remembrance of her — and of Shanta’s mother too. He knew he had to wait until it was appropriate to bring up these matters, trifles in comparison to what Shanta was going through. He hoped there was time yet for his priorities.

She spoke fast, as though she had a dog at her heels, chasing her. “One way of putting it is that I’ve lived in a dark house, with the blinds drawn, and where the air is sour, and where I am alone, even though I haven’t chosen to live by myself. I live in hope, though. I say to myself every hour that one day my daughter will be back, she who worked out for herself what marriage is like, at the age of four, and said so to me.”

Jeebleh sucked at his teeth, sensing there was no point asking the same question for the third time. He suspected she wouldn’t be goaded into giving away more than she wanted.

Now it was Shanta asking a question: “Why do you think Faahiye had a hand in my daughter’s disappearance? I understand from talking to someone that you believe this to be the case.”

“I don’t remember saying any such thing to anyone.”

“You’ve been to see Caloosha,” she said, “and you’ve talked to Af-Laawe, and you’ve also spoken at length with Bile. What are your views? What are your conclusions?”

“I haven’t come to any yet.”

“Has Faahiye kidnapped her? He would need help from one of the Strongmen. Or has he done it on his own? And if so, why?”

He noted this time that she spoke her husband’s name like a curse. Then she lapsed into a ruinous state of mind, appearing overwhelmed with the genuine emotion of a love gone sour, or hate gone seedy. Self-consciously, her hand went close to but dared not touch the well of her eyes. He remembered her as a child, remembered how she used to cry at the slightest pretext. By all accounts, hers was a life of high-flown emotions now, of days filled with incessant weeping.

“We’re under a curse, as a family,” she said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Caloosha had you and Bile, his own brothers, locked up, and is suspected of killing his stepfather. More recently, since our mother’s death, several events, one after another, have turned what I, for one, first imagined to be blessings — the birth I had looked forward to all my life, and freedom for a brother who had been in prison and whom I waited to welcome — into curses. Times being abnormal, Bile touches me where he isn’t supposed to, and does taboo things that he isn’t allowed to. There’s talk of murder, and there’s talk of robbery. My husband questions, I take sides. We quarrel, my husband and I, and he leaves. My brother is hurt, and spends more time sulking than I’ve ever known him to do, telling me in so many words that I’ve brought ruin on our heads. My daughter and her playmate vanish mysteriously. Are they kidnapped? Have they been taken hostage? And if so, who’s got them? Does their disappearance have a political angle? When I was young, not given to reflection and not in the know, I used to think there was something remarkable about our family, something unique. Now it seems we’re uniquely cursed. And things aren’t what they’ve appeared to be for much of my life.”

“Has Faahiye been in touch?” Jeebleh asked.

“The phone rings.”

He stared at her, saying nothing, puzzled.

“My phone rings, and when I pick it up, it falls silent,” she continued, snuffling. “It rings again, and again no one speaks, no one says anything. So I don’t pick it up anymore.”

“Why would the kidnappers call and then say nothing?”

“I’m sure it’s Faahiye!”

“Why would he be doing that?”

“To torture me!”

Jeebleh waited warily for her to explain further, but she ceased speaking altogether, swept away by a violent torrent of emotion. There was a feverish intensity to her behavior. He offered her his handkerchief, which she accepted and held in her hand, staring at it as if she didn’t know what use to put it to. Again snuffling, she said, “Raasta was a wonder child!”

“Why ‘was,’ why not ‘is’?”

“Because when she’s returned to us, she’ll have changed from the child I knew as my baby, and will have become a total stranger to me. She’ll have been tortured. No child can survive this kind of torment. Her days of captivity will haunt her forever. My daughter is living in fear.”

“No hard news about her, none whatsoever?”

“No one tells me anything.”

“Why haven’t you spoken of your worries to Bile?”

“For fear that he might think I am inventing things,” she said.

“I feel certain that he won’t,” Jeebleh said.

“Unless it rings when he is here, he won’t believe me, he’ll assume that I am a distraught mother inventing things, like the ringing of a phone with no one at the other end. It’s possible that someone is keeping an eye on my movements, and on whoever comes here. The phone rings after Bile has come and gone, not when he is here. Am I mad and imagining things? I don’t know. Maybe I hear the phones ringing in my head, because I wish someone to get in touch with me. I am alone for much of the time, you see. I’ve no friends left. Many of them avoid me, because I keep talking about Raasta and Makka. But even in my madness, my daughter wants to come home, to me, away from the deceivers!”

When he heard her say “deceivers,” he concluded that she wasn’t completely mad, for he knew whom she meant. He felt more bound to her now, felt a deeper kinship, as a fellow sufferer at their hands.

She said, “I am a mother, deprived of the company of her loving daughter. It shouldn’t surprise you or anyone else if I follow a bend and go where madness, beckoning to my sense of despair, is the supreme authority.”

“You’re not mad!” he assured her.

“I only have circumstantial evidence,” she said, and the sad memory of what scanty evidence she had made her bend over. She held her head between her knees, sobbing.

They were back in her preteen years, when she used to embark on bouts of intense caterwauling, crying her throat sore until she got what she was after. Now she was a tantrum-throwing kid. She could contain herself one minute in lawyerese, her syntax perfect, her logic impeccable, and in the next minute burst into tears, and look mad and miserable.

He wouldn’t lose hope. He would badger her until he got some adequate answers out of her: “Has anyone that you know of seen Raasta?”

“Af-Laawe has seen Faahiye!”

Clever at taking advantage of anyone with needs, Af-Laawe qualified as one of the deceivers. He had the knack of turning up to offer a hand. Who was Af-Laawe, and what was his role in all this?

“Have you mentioned this to Bile?”

“I have.”

“And his reaction?”

“He promised he would look into the matter.”

“Will he, do you think?”

“I doubt that he ever will!”

She was on firmer ground now. This was clear from her body language and her voice. She sat facing the curtainless window, now open, and the sun reflected in her eye made her appear less sad, but a trifle sterner.

She said, “Because Af-Laawe sees himself as a rival of Bile’s, and as the other, that’s to say, Bile’s darker side, he’s difficult to catch out. Af-Laawe will tell you that he’s committed to the well-being of the dead, as if the dead cared, and that he buries them at no charge, which isn’t true, of course, and that, like Bile, he came upon a windfall of funds with a mysterious origin. The truth is different. We know where Af-Laawe’s money came from, that he is a devious fellow, and that Caloosha is his mentor — the overall head of what I’d like to call, for lack of a better term, the cartel. And don’t think I’m mad or a raving paranoiac — I’m not, I’ll have you know.”

She was making a convincing case, but he wanted to know: “What cartel? What’re you talking about?”

“The business interests of the cartel are suspect,” she said. “Initially established by Af-Laawe as an NGO to help with ferrying and burying the city’s unclaimed dead, it’s recently branched out into other nefarious activities. The cartel, my reliable source has it, sends all the receipted bills to a Dutch charity based in Utrecht. But that doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is what happens before the corpses are buried. Terrible things are done to the bodies between the time they are collected in Af-Laawe’s van and the time they are taken to the cemetery. A detour is made to a safe house, where surgeons on retainer are on twenty-four-hour call. These surgeons remove the kidneys and hearts of the recently dead. Once these internal organs are tested and found to be in good working order, they are flown to hospitals in the Middle East, where they are sold and transplanted.”

Jeebleh sat upright. Outlandish as it all sounded, he remembered being present when the corpse of the ten-year-old at the airport was transferred into Af-Laawe’s van, and that the young man killed in his hotel room was put in the same van. He remembered how quickly Af-Laawe had acted to move the bodies, and how he had arranged for Jeebleh to ride in another car from the airport, although he had clearly intended to pick him up. Maybe there was some grisly truth in what Shanta was saying?

“Is Bile aware of all this?”

“It’s not in his nature to talk, even if he is.”

“Why not?”

“Because he doesn’t wish his integrity questioned.”

A latticework of shadows fell on her face, and Shanta’s features made Jeebleh think of an old canvas in the process of being restored. He saw crevices where there were darker shadows, and imagined scars where the shadows were lighter.

“And you think it’s the cartel that has kidnapped the girls?” he asked. “To get them out of the way so there will be no refuge for those fleeing the fighting? Or are Af-Laawe and Caloosha getting at Bile, each for his own reason?”

“Everything is possible.”

“But the cartel, assuming it does exist, won’t allow the girls to come to harm, will it? Especially if, as you say, Caloosha has something to do with it?”

Shanta was no longer in a mood to answer his questions, and her chest exploded into a mournful lament. She managed to say, despite her emotional state, “The cartel is in the service of evil!”

“Have you spoken to Caloosha about your worries?”

“I have.”

“His response?”

“He says he is doing all that he can to have the girls traced. He says they are probably being held in the south of the city, which is not under his — StrongmanNorth’s — jurisdiction, but StrongmanSouth’s. But you know why I think he too won’t help at all? Because the cartel’s source of corpses will dry up if Raasta is back in circulation.”

“Che maledizione!” Jeebleh cursed.

Snuffling more mightily, she trotted off, head down and body trembling, in the direction of a door that he assumed would lead to the toilet, presumably to complete her crying away from his gaze. He heard the boy moving about upstairs and muttering, perhaps entertaining himself with talk. But who was the boy? What was he doing here?

Shanta was away for at least fifteen minutes, and when she returned she sat from across him, not quite recomposed. She crossed and recrossed her legs, reminding him of an agitated mother hen fighting with all her might to save her chicks from the vulture preying on them.

AT JEEBLEH’S SUGGESTION, THEY MOVED OUT TO THE GARDEN, WHERE THEY sat on a bench under a mango tree, its shade as sweet as the fruit itself. Unwatered and ravaged by neglect, the garden was a comfortless witness to the nation’s despair, which was there for all to see.

“Whose house is this?” he asked.

She looked away, first at the mango tree, which had begun to bear fruit, and then at a colorful finch hanging over one of the branches, cheerfully young and full of chirp. “Our own house is in an area that in the days when you lived here was known as Hawl-Wadaag but that has recently been named Bermuda. The neighborhood was destroyed in the fighting between StrongmanSouth and a minor warlord allied with StrongmanNorth. This house belongs to friends of mine who’ve moved to North America.”

“Have you lived here for long?”

“We’ve been very unhappy,” she said.

Jeebleh looked about, distressed.

“Perhaps the deteriorated state of the garden and the house explains why we’ve been unhappy here,” she said.

How unlike one another are unhappy families: Tolstoy?

“We’ve stayed on a collision course, Faahiye and I,” she said, “quarreling a great deal and unnecessarily. We’ve been in the sight of an evil eye, that’s seen much ill!”

“Because of what?”

“Because of the curse of which I’ve spoken.”

“But Bile at least had no choice,” Jeebleh reasoned.

Yet there was no reasoning with her. She said, her voice shaken, “He touched me in ways that he shouldn’t have. And because of this, we’ve earned ourselves a curse, this way harvesting nature’s ill intentions.”

“In his place, what would you have done?”

“In my rational mind, I know that it was a matter of life and death, and he had to make a decision, and voted in favor of life, voted for life. I am alive, and Raasta is a wonder child and, thank God, healthy. You ask what the problem is? Well, the problem is that what’s been done can’t be undone. The problem is that the curse has become part of us, affecting us all.”

Her expression reminded him of the oval face of an owl in the dark, seen from the advantaged position of someone in the light. “Was that part of the curse, what happened between Bile and Faahiye the moment they met?”

“They were at each other’s throats, because of what happened,” she said, “and it fell to me to make peace between them. It’s always fallen to women to forge the peace between all these hot-blooded men, always ready to go to war at the slightest provocation. Faahiye and my brothers are no different from the majority of men who’ve brought Somalia to ruin! Why do men behave the way they do, warring?”

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Maybe because they’ve got no sense of grief?”

He let this pass without comment, and waited for her tears to subside.

“Tell me who the boy in the house is.”

There was smugness in her gaze as she turned in the direction where the boy was playing by himself. “He belongs in The Refuge. He came here to play with Raasta the day she disappeared, and has since refused to go anywhere else until she’s back. He has become a kind of insurance policy, mine, that there will be a child in this house!”

It struck Jeebleh that for his entire visit, she didn’t seem mad at all. Emotionally charged, yes, but that was more than understandable in a woman whose daughter was missing. In fact, she was confident enough to pleasantly offer him a plate of warmed-up food — yesterday’s leftovers — if he had a mind to eat. And she was talking in a straightforward manner and answering his questions, and saying and doing nothing far-fetched or deranged. No one would doubt that she was as sane as he was.

He shifted the conversation: “Whose idea was it, do you know, that dinners at The Refuge should be a communal affair?”

She wasn’t sure specifically, but thought it could only have been a woman’s idea, even if it had come from Bile, who might have relied on the women around him. Women, after all, often ate in this way and knew the benefits accruing from it.

He nodded, remaining silent.

“For one thing, women waste less food,” she said. “For another, eating together from the same plate is more gregarious. Besides, as you well know, we women have always eaten together, after serving our husbands. That women are content with seconds or leftovers suggests that we’re prepared to compromise for the sake of peace. Not so men!”

He let the silence run its full course, and then asked if she had any suggestions about how he could reach the woman who had kept house for his mother. Her stare as hard as stone, she looked ahead of her, as though not aware of him at all. Again her lips moved like a bird feeding. Then her lips stopped and formed an O. “I knew where she lived, in Medina, before the collapse. I haven’t seen her since then, as I had no reason to. But it shouldn’t be difficult to find her if she’s alive and in the city.”

“Caloosha tells me she’s left for Mombasa.”

“Isn’t that what he says about Faahiye too?”

“That’s right.”

“Have you asked Dajaal to look for her?”

He responded that he hadn’t, and she reiterated that Dajaal could find anyone or anything; he was useful that way.

“Bile tells me that, among other things, you’ve come here to honor the memory of your mother,” she said. “I would like to join you in doing so for our mother too. They raised us together as one family. What did you have in mind?”

His prayers for his mother began right away, in his imagining, with the whistle of a red-and-yellow-breasted robin perched on the branch of the mango tree.

He said, “I would like somehow to mark my mother’s passing, perhaps with a day of prayers, a gathering of some sort, most likely at The Refuge. But first I’d like to locate her grave and pay a visit, and then maybe commission the raising of a stone in prayer, in her memory. Nothing extravagant, like a mausoleum, but it would be good if I could in some way reclaim her troubled soul from the purgatory to which Caloosha helped relegate her.”

“The idea of using The Refuge to commemorate her life is wonderful,” she said. “I like it very much, and hope that Raasta is there to celebrate the marking with us.”

She released a long-suppressed snuffle.

He fell silent, ready to ask her pardon and take his leave, as soon as it was decent to do so.

21

WHEN HE RETURNED TO BILE’S, JEEBLEH INSERTED THE KEY IN THE LOCK but had difficulty opening it. The key would turn loosely, without engaging to move the bolt. Then he heard footsteps approaching cautiously, and guessing it might be Seamus, he announced himself: “It’s me, Jeebleh!”

The bolt was released at once, the door opened, and Seamus stood there, broad as his smile.

“Is she off her rocker, as Bile believes?”

Jeebleh didn’t answer, and walked past Seamus into the living room, where he sat down. His friend joined him. When he’d brought Seamus up to speed about his visit with Shanta, Jeebleh fell silent, exhausted from the effort of remembering what he had been through.

“What about the boy?” Seamus wanted to know. “Is he still there at Shanta’s, refusing to leave until Raasta returns home to play with him?”

Jeebleh didn’t reply, because he had other worries on his mind. He wore a sullen expression, his stare unfocused, as if he couldn’t see or hear a thing.

Seamus, disturbed, tried to reach out in sympathy: “Are you okay?”

“I am.”

“But you’ve got the shakes!”

On edge, Jeebleh was getting worse by the second, and looking as if he might have a nervous breakdown right in front of Seamus. He held his stomach and, bending double, made as though he might bring up his worries. A portmanteau of jitters, he was short of breath, his eyes startled, as if his guts were being emptied, to be flown out of the country, as parts. He was showing a passive side to his nature, like someone not responsible for what he was doing. Yes, something was happening to the action man, and he wasn’t able to fight it off. Jeebleh, known for his tough stances and rational behavior, looked unlike anything Seamus could ever have associated with him. “I don’t like what’s happening to me,” he said.

“What’s happening to you?” Seamus asked.

“I’m now part of the story, in that I’ve taken sides, and made choices that might put my life in danger.”

Seamus shook his head in sorrow, as if he knew exactly what Jeebleh meant. “I know too many people who couldn’t help getting too involved, couldn’t avoid becoming part of this nation’s trouble. You need to return to being your usual self — a father to your daughters, a husband to your wife, and a professor to your students. You should leave the country while there’s time.”

“What are you saying?”

“It’s time you left,” Seamus said.

“It is, but I won’t leave yet.”

“What’s holding you back?”

“Some unfinished business awaits my attention.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing!” Seamus told him.

In response, Jeebleh took refuge in a Somali wisdom about a man who bit the stronger of two fighting dogs on the ear in anger, because it was molesting the weaker one, torturing it. He added: “I’ve already made a name for myself, haven’t I, standing up to my clan family?”

“For goodness sake,” Seamus pleaded, “they tried to murder you.”

“I won’t risk my life unnecessarily, I promise!”

Seamus ignored the promise. “It makes me sad to think that you’ll not only become part of the civil war story, but get totally lost in it, because the story is much bigger than you, and might prove deadlier than you can imagine. My only advice is that if you won’t quit, you watch out and make sure you aren’t sucked into the vortex.”

“I’ll be very careful,” Jeebleh said.

Seamus tried to steady his look before speaking. His arms folded across his chest, his manner ponderous, he said, “I’ve been there too at the crossroads, where arrivals meet departures, and where self-doubt meets with certainties and self-recrimination. And I’ve avoided becoming part of the story!”

Jeebleh now watched Seamus busy himself with some domestic chore or other, acknowledging silently that he could’ve left without trying to tie the necessary loose ends. Now this was impossible. If he left, he would be walking away from a part of himself — and leaving behind a piece of his history too. He didn’t want to do that.

“For years now,” Seamus was saying, “people have been coming to Somalia, every one of them intending to do their bit and then leave. The Americans came, as their then president put it, to do God’s work! God knows they didn’t do that. But then, did they just leave as they had planned? No, they were drawn into the vortices of clan intrigues, and when they left, they left parts of themselves behind. Making a choice and then acting on that decision and leaving: these are out of our hands before we’re aware of where we are.”

Jeebleh asked, “Why have you stayed?”

“Sometime during my second visit,” Seamus said, “I realized that I’d mislaid something of myself here during my first visit, and I had to return for it. Instead of retrieving it and leaving immediately, I’ve stayed. It’s possible that some of us cannot help losing ourselves in the sorrows of other people’s stories. I can vouch that you’ve changed since your visit to Shanta’s, I can see that. If you asked what Somalia is to me, having stayed, I would respond that it is the Ireland of my exiled neurosis.”

“My story cast in misanthropy!” Jeebleh said.

“You’re doing whatever it is you’re doing out of empathy, not hate,” Seamus suggested. “You feel deep love for justice. I’m moved to hear you tell the story of the man who bit the stronger of the two dogs. After all, there isn’t much of a story in ‘dog bites man,’ because it happens all the time. But when a man bites a dog for reasons to do with justice, it’s a big story, worthy of a newspaper headline. So could you explain to me, in the light of all this, why you’ve returned to your country in its hour of tragedy? I’ve been told that you’ve come to visit your mother’s grave. But you’ve done bugger-all about that! So what made you come?”

Jeebleh reached inside his mind for the strength he sensed he now lacked, and found himself in a corridor as narrow as tunnels are dark. He tried to locate the arrows that might point to an exit, but there were none. His hands in front of him, he fumbled forward, and finally fell back on a version he had rehearsed to himself several times before. Retelling it for Seamus’s benefit, he described his unpleasant brush with death, when a Somali, new to New York and driving a taxi illegally, nearly ran him over. He conjured it all like a film shot on a busy New York street, demonstrating the startled look on the face of the Somali, and revisiting his own days recovering in a hospital. He slowed down to prepare himself for a challenge from Seamus, well aware that his friend could argue that by coming to Mogadiscio, he was not so much thinking about his mortality as seeking out death.

“Have you come to court death, then?” Seamus asked.

“It’s no longer clear why I’ve come,” he said.

“Would you be ready to bite the stronger of two dogs on its ear, in anger, as the Somali wisdom has it?”

Jeebleh assured him that he would.

“Are you prepared to kill and to be killed?”

“I could be, depending.”

“On what?”

“What’s at stake.”

Apropos a question not asked, Seamus said, “The violence that’s war, combined with the violence that’s famine, run in my blood and in the veins of my memory, and so I understand where you’re coming from, and where you find yourself.”

Agitated, he took his drawing pad and traced a half-human, half-animal figure, a man of advanced age, supporting himself on a walking stick and begging. Then he drew the figure of a woman à la Matisse, strong lines, prominently Fauvist in their pursuit of self-release. Jeebleh knew that Seamus would continue drawing until he provided the woman with a singularly abundant breast. And if he was in the mood, he would draw a baby, whom the woman would suckle. He would grow calm only when the drawing was done, and once the baby wore the capricious expression of a cynic.

Jeebleh put this down to Seamus’s childhood terrors: a grenade had been thrown into the window of his family’s living room, killing Seamus’s father, his sister, and two brothers — everyone but Seamus and his mother; in frequent childhood nightmares, Seamus would wake from his sleep, shouting, “But why me?” He would talk expansively about the incident, but not about the fact that the man alleged to have thrown the grenade had later died violently himself. At being asked pointed questions about this, Seamus would drop into a depressive silence. After regaining his tongue, he might tell you that although he had been in the area when the man died, he hadn’t been charged, and that the police had cleared his name within a few days, for lack of evidence.

But Jeebleh risked asking about it. He felt he had to hear about it. “If you didn’t have a hand in the man’s death, and I’ll assume that to be the case,” Jeebleh said, “why were you accused of it? How was it that your presence in the area had been noted and you were suspected?”

“Because no one living in a country in which a civil war is raging is deemed to be innocent. Here in Somalia too everyone is potentially guilty, and may be accused unfairly of crimes they’ve committed only by association. If you are a member of the same clan family as a perpetrator of a crime, then you’re guilty, aren’t you?”

“Do you still wake up, shouting ‘Why me’?”

“Not anymore I don’t,” Seamus said.

“That’s a relief!”

“Living in Mogadiscio, seeing so much devastation and death from the civil war, and working at The Refuge have cured me of that.”

Jeebleh had heard the passion in Seamus’s voice when he spoke of Raasta. He obviously adored her, as though she were his own child. His affection seemed to border on obsession. That morning Jeebleh had seen Seamus’s room in the apartment. There were photographs of the girl everywhere, on the walls, on key rings. Two photographs that he had taken hung on either side of his bed. In addition, he had many drawings of Raasta, stacks and stacks of them. Seamus was apparently in the habit of drawing her when he was nervous, which was a great deal of the time, and he drew rather competently, at times almost like a professional. “She gives a purpose to my continued stay in Mogadiscio, despite the risks,” he said now.

“What is she like?”

“A halo of comfort to me,” he said. “An elated sense of peace descends on my head when she is around me. In her presence, I am as happy as a yuppie throwing his first housewarming party.”

It occurred to Jeebleh that Seamus, the polyglot from Northern Ireland, might have some thoughts related to his pronoun obsession. He tried it on him: “What pronoun do you think is appropriate when you refer to the people of Belfast? Not in terms of being Catholic or Protestant, but just people?”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

“Do you use ‘we’ because you see yourself as part of that community, or ‘they’—a ploy as good as any to distance yourself and to distinguish yourself from the sectarian insanity of which you’re not part?”

After some serious thought, Seamus said, “I don’t know if I’m as conscious of the pronouns as you are. Anyway, what pronouns do you deploy?”

“Myself, I use ‘we’ when I mean Somalis in general, and ‘they’ when I am speaking about clan politics and those who promote it. This came to me when I was refusing to contribute toward the repair of their battlewagon, for I didn’t want to be part of their war effort. I left their side of the green line and relocated in the section of the city where the other clan family is concentrated. It’s as if I’ve written myself out of their lives.”

“Enemies matter to those who create them,” Seamus responded quickly.

“I’m not with you.”

“When you think of them as ‘they’ and therefore create them yourself, then it follows that you become an enemy to them the moment you opt out of their inclusive ‘we.’ As it happens, you are worth a lot more to them dead than alive, assuming of course that they can lay their hands on the wealth you had in your room or on your person.”

Jeebleh nodded in agreement. “Another Somali proverb has it that the shoes of a dead man are more useful than he is.”

“How cynical can a people get.”

“I would say we’re a practical nation.”

“Deceitful too,” Seamus said, and after a pause went on: “I bet Af-Laawe would’ve helped them to effect their clannish claim on your cash and so on. He’d be attending to your corpse in jig time, before anyone else knew you were a goner.”

“Is he as much of a shit as Shanta depicts him to be?” Jeebleh asked. A wayward silence gave him the luxury to recall Af-Laawe’s thoughts on pronouns. But when other memories from other dealings that had passed between him and Af-Laawe called on him, Jeebleh felt his body going numb, as though his limbs had been rendered lifeless. Nor could he shake off the shock of hearing Shanta’s suspicions about the cartel! Shanta was a mother with a missing daughter, and at times she was clutching at straws, but some of her speculations made sense to him. “Tell me about Af-Laawe.”

“The man is in the thick of every wicked deed,” Seamus said. “Unconfirmed rumor places him in the role of go-between, something he’s apparently good at.”

“Where else does rumor place him?”

“I understand he ran an underhand scheme,” Seamus said, “in which four-wheel-drive vehicles were spirited away with the help of Somali drivers and some UN foreign employees. Again, he acted as a go-between, linking the UN insiders and the Somali drivers. But he received the biggest cut, because it was his racket. The Somali drivers would vanish into the city’s no-go areas, and the Lord knows there were many, and some UN bureaucrat would get his commission in cash. And the vehicles would end up in Kenya or Ethiopia! You’ll probably have heard of the four-million-dollar heist, the one that made it into the international press.”

“Why do you think he hasn’t quit, retired on his millions?”

“He’s past the stage when he can just walk away,” Seamus speculated. “I presume he gets a kick out of courting danger on a daily basis. Sure as eggs is eggs, he’s his own story now, and too big a man to lose himself in other people’s fibs, or to care about them. My guess is that he’ll eventually tempt Caloosha’s wrath, and he’ll end up dead.”

Jeebleh looked disconcerted: “And the AIC?”

“What about him?”

“Did he become part of the story too?”

“Fools are famous for the gaffes they make,” Seamus said. “We weren’t on first-name terms, the AIC and I, but we got on reasonably well until he lost his way in the complex plot of Somalia’s story. He may have meant to do ‘good,’ but his methods were highly questionable. In the process, he ended up behaving very much like StrongmanSouth, whom he meant to expose.”

“He too became his own story?”

“And he compounded the problem by misinforming the American militariat and the UN too. I don’t wish to be unfair to him, but I think that in the end he mislaid his marbles.”

“Would you say he was evil?”

Seamus’s worries made him look more careworn, and a little paler. “I would say he was banal.”

“No one’s going to think of anything else when ‘banal’ comes this close to ‘evil.’”

“He was true to type, and American.”

Not knowing what to make of this, Jeebleh let it be. He concentrated his stare on a gecko at the bottom of the wall, within reach of his hand, and a fly washing its head reflectively, as though tempting the gecko.

SEAMUS’S EYES CLOSED VERY, VERY SLOWLY, LIKE THOSE OF A CHILD RESISTING sleep. Then the phone rang, and Jeebleh answered it. Shanta was at the other end. There was a life-or-death urgency to her voice. She wanted Jeebleh at her place right away, but wouldn’t tell him why. Assuming the worst, he got in touch with Dajaal, who promised he would take him there at once.

22

NO SOONER HAD JEEBLEH PUT ON HIS SEAT BELT THAN HE APPROACHED Dajaal about joining his cause. He broached the subject with the timidity of someone who had no wish to spend another day behind bars in a detention cell.

“Supposing that I set my sights on destroying a man who’s wrought havoc on my life and done irreparable damage to others close to me,” he said, “and supposing I were to ask you to help, would you give me a hand?”

Sounding as if he had given the subject some thought, and had been expecting the request to come for some time, Dajaal answered, “Of course I would.”

Jeebleh mulled this over and then said noncommittally, “You realize I haven’t a clear idea of what’s involved?”

“Nor have I much of an idea what you’re talking about, come to think of it,” Dajaal said, “but there’s time to develop these plans, plot and fine-tune them. In my previous experience as an army man, and as a long associate of Bile — I’m eternally devoted to him — I have undertaken tough jobs. My training has prepared me, and I am always willing to accept risky tasks in the line of duty.”

Jeebleh assured him that he hadn’t discussed the topic with anyone else, and that it was too soon to come up with a blueprint. In any case, they wouldn’t make any moves until they were clear in their heads about the fate of the girls. Till then, Jeebleh said, mum’s the word!

Dajaal told Jeebleh that as an army officer he was trained to share secret information on a “no-name, no-packdrill” basis. He, Dajaal, would honor that.

“What about Bile?”

“What about him?” Dajaal asked.

They had arrived at Shanta’s gate. “How will he take it?” Jeebleh said.

“He’s aware of your plans?”

“I haven’t spoken to him at all about my plans.”

“When I met him at the clinic this morning,” Dajaal explained, “Bile alluded to how a female bee mates with any drone she meets in the course of her honey-making business.”

“Have you any idea what he was saying to you?”

“Not really,” Dajaal replied. “But he explained it this way: that for his self-fulfillment, a torturer will be content to torture a victim wherever he may come across one.”

When Jeebleh said, “Thank you,” he did not know whether he was thanking Dajaal for the lift or for the details of what Bile had said, or simply bringing their conversation to an abrupt end because he was feeling uncomfortable.

Jeebleh got out of the car. Dajaal chose not to accompany him, but to wait outside until he was sure that his presence was no longer needed.

JEEBLEH WAS SURPRISED THAT SHANTA DIDN’T EVEN BOTHER TO WELCOME him or thank him for coming promptly. As soon as she saw him, she cursed: “The son of a bitch has called.”

He was tempted to say, “Where are your manners?” but decided to make an allowance for Shanta. Of course, he could guess whom she meant, and he waited for her to say more. There was rage in her voice, old rage mixed with new.

“Did he say where he was calling from?”

“He sounded so close that it could’ve been from the house next door,” she said. Then she turned her back on Jeebleh and, again cursing like a drill sergeant—“The son of a bitch”—walked away. He didn’t follow her inside immediately.

He averted is gaze, finding no pleasure in seeing her curves through the diaphanous dress she wore, a garment adorned with fluttering birds. He thought of his wife, to whom he had spoken the day before.

Shanta made him even more uncomfortable with her abusive language. “The son of a donkey has rung, but doesn’t want to speak to me. Can you believe it?”

He entered the house and shut the door. He reminded himself how he had been reared in a venerable tradition in which you pretended that nothing untoward had taken place if a respectable person misbehaved in your presence.

“Would you like a cup of tea, while we’re waiting?” she asked.

He wondered whether it was wise to have tea with her or even to wait, when he didn’t know why he was waiting, precisely for whom or for what, or for how long. That she continued to swear irritated him greatly, he had no idea why. He spoke slowly: “Tell me if I’m right. Faahiye, your husband, called between the time I was here last and the time you called me at the apartment, and he said he’d call again, but didn’t give a definite time or reason. Did he name the person he wanted to talk to?”

“He wants to speak to you.” She nearly flew into a fresh rage. “‘I want to speak to Jeebleh.’ That’s how he put it. ‘I want to talk to that man and no one else, and I want you to ring him and get him, and I’ll call!’”

“I hope you’re not blaming me.”

“Have you been talking to him behind our backs?” She looked like a floor cloth, untidy in her moment of sheer rage. “Tell me the truth!”

“No, I haven’t.”

“So why has he rung you, if you haven’t?”

“I wish I knew.”

“It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“If Faahiye and I had spoken, as you say,” Jeebleh challenged her, “would he not have a better way of reaching me?”

“I suppose you are right.” She settled into the sofa, shifting in it. She rubbed her forehead with her hand, as though this might help reduce her pain. The minutes passed slowly. He thought of trying to assure her that he was not offended by her insinuation, but chose not to, certain that it would be of no use.

“He rang me soon after you left,” she said.

Jeebleh thought that maybe one of Caloosha’s security operatives who was keeping tabs on him had seen him with Shanta, as they walked away from where the epileptic man had collapsed. When the word got through to Caloosha, he might have called Faahiye and asked that he speak to Jeebleh. It was safe to assume that Faahiye would do what he had been told.

“Did he say anything about Raasta?”

“No.”

Even though it wasn’t in Jeebleh’s nature to see the bright side of things, he felt he needed to be optimistic. The words came to him easily, but he was having difficulty in delivering them convincingly, so he repeated them to himself over and over. Faahiye wouldn’t be making contact unless he had decided to bring the crisis to an agreeable end; he was free to make such a decision on his own, and not at someone else’s suggestion. But Jeebleh couldn’t pass his optimism on to Shanta, as he feared that she would become more aggressive.

And she would not give up. “Why, of all the people in the world, has he chosen to talk only to you, if you haven’t been in touch with him on your own?”

“I have no idea,” Jeebleh said.

“There’s got to be a reason,” she insisted. “I’ve never known him to do anything unless he’s given it a lot of consideration, and studied it from every possible angle.”

Jeebleh said, “Maybe he thinks it’ll be easier to talk to me, because I’m the only one who’s known him for donkey’s years and with whom he hasn’t quarreled?”

“I am Raasta’s mother.”

Jeebleh was on the verge of saying that that was beside the point, but it dawned on him that the opposite was the case: The fact that she was Raasta’s mother was the point. He speculated aloud: “Maybe he looks on me as a neutral person, or an impartial judge, able to listen to the two sides of the argument judiciously?”

“What two sides? There are no two sides! I want my daughter back, and I want her now. He can go where he pleases, something he’s already done. I don’t care. I want my Raasta back.”

“We’re assuming, without knowing it for a fact, that he’s holding Raasta hostage,” he countered.

“Why do you say we’re assuming that?”

“Because we are,” he said.

“Isn’t he?” she asked.

“We haven’t established that.”

Shanta grew more and more tense, and then, exhausted, slumped back lifelessly. He sat forward and, turning slightly, saw a slim book in Italian written by Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, a Somali of Persian origin. He recalled reading the book in New York, and thinking that it was no mean feat for a housewife to write about her life in Mogadiscio, and then her exile in Italy. He was pleased that Somalis were recording their ideas about themselves and their country, sometimes in their own language, sometimes in foreign tongues. These efforts, meager as they might seem, pointed to the gaps in the world’s knowledge about Somalia. Reading the slim volume had been salutary, because unlike many books by authors with clan-sharpened axes to grind, this was not a grievance-driven pamphlet. It was charming, in that you felt that the author was the first to write a book about the civil war from a Somali perspective. He asked Shanta what she thought about the book.

“I hadn’t been aware of the depth of her hurt until I read it,” she said, “just as I hadn’t given much thought, I confess, to the suffering of many Somalis of Tanzanian, Mozambican, or Yemeni descent. The civil war has brought much of that deep hurt to the surface. I hope that one day we’ll all get back together as one big Somali family and talk things through.”

“Who’s to blame for what’s happened?”

“I hate the word ‘blame,’” she said.

“Is Shirin Fazel Persian? Or is she one of us, Somali?”

“She is a deeply hurt Somali, like you and me,” she said. “When you are deeply hurt, you return to the memories you’ve been raised on, to make sense of what’s happening.”

“Do you reinvent your life?” Jeebleh asked.

“It is as if you see yourself through new eyes. And then you reason that you’re different, because you are after all from a different place, with a different ancestral memory.”

“You feel left out when you are hurt?”

“I suppose that is what Shirin Fazel feels. Left out and victimized, because she is of Persian descent.”

“Is Faahiye hurt in a similar manner?” Jeebleh asked.

“Because his family was different from ours?”

“Did he speak about it?”

“That would be uncharacteristic of him.”

“Because he belongs to the old world, in which you don’t speak about what hurt you, is that why? Or is it because he believed that the clan business had nothing to do with his hurt? That it was personal?”

“He belongs to a world,” Shanta explained, “in which he expects that those hurting him will realize their mistake of their own accord and, without being told, stop hurting him any further.”

“What do people do when they’re hurt?” he asked.

“Tell me.”

“Some people go public, and they show the world that they’re hurt. They accuse those who’ve hurt them, they become abusive, vindictive. Some become suicidal. Some withdraw with their hurt into the privacy of their destroyed homes, and sulk, and whine. To someone who’s hurt, nothing is sacred.”

Jeebleh felt oddly comforted by the thought that Shanta, no longer tearful, was attentive. No outbursts of emotion, nor did she behave neurotically when they talked in general terms. He must take care not to spring a question on her, lest she drop into a state of nervous tension.

“Why, why, why, why?” she asked.

He disregarded her question; he should muster the strength and the wit to make her relax until Faahiye called or Bile arrived — Bile would, he thought, show up at Shanta’s sooner or later — whichever came first. Then he became aware of her fixed stare.

“He turned our private quarrel into a public spectacle,” she accused. “He left, so the world would talk about him. And do you know why he did that? He did that to exact vengeance.” She was calm, composed as she spoke, and nothing indicated that she would go weepy on him. “By going public,” she went on, “he brought his hurt out into the open, as though he expected to receive a proper redress. Did he think how I might feel, how Bile might feel? Then Raasta and Makka disappeared.”

Jeebleh realized that she was staring at him, in fact focusing on a dribble of saliva dangling from his lower lip. Embarrassed at his dribbling like a baby, as he was prone to do whenever he concentrated, he sucked it in with a gust of air. He remembered that he had lent her his handkerchief, so he dried his chin with the back of his hand. He was about to excuse himself, when she started to speak.

“A wife is not likely to display her hurt in public the way a husband does. A woman doesn’t go blatantly public until after she has tried other ways of communicating with her spouse. Women keep these things under wraps for much longer than men do. It’s only when a woman can no longer deal with it that she speaks of it, first to her friends, then to her spouse. Only when no solution to the problem is in sight does she speak to others. It takes a very long time before outsiders hear of the marriage problem from a wife. By the time a woman makes it public, we can assume that the marriage is doomed.”

He couldn’t help thinking that this sounded like the crossroads where the Somali people stood. Like Faahiye and Shanta, they were not prepared to talk directly, but only through intermediaries — in the case of Somalia, through foreign adjudicators. Interfamilial disputes had a way of becoming protracted, at times requiring an eternity for the parties in the conflict to sit face to face and talk — alone!

They both looked toward the door, then at each other. Jeebleh wasn’t sure if he had heard a car door open and then close. The optimist in him wondered whether that might be Faahiye coming home, with Raasta? He waited for the noise to make sense, but none came. He had almost given up, when the gate outside creaked. It was then that he stood, bracing himself for an unpleasant surprise. But when he opened the door, he saw Bile at the gate, waving to Dajaal as he drove off.

JEEBLEH, SHANTA, AND BILE SAT AND TALKED, AND BILE WAS INFORMED OF the developments relating to Faahiye. Though their hearts were not in it, they chatted about other things, not to kill the time, but because they were nervous, the three of them, for different reasons.

“All this waiting is getting us nowhere,” Bile said, “and we have no idea why we are waiting.”

“We’re waiting for Faahiye to ring.”

“This is ridiculous.” Bile addressed Shanta: “While we wait, perhaps you can repeat the precise words Faahiye used, for my benefit.”

Shanta obliged. “The mobile rang and I answered it, saying hello. I said hello several times, and then Faahiye spoke. He said that he’d called for ‘that man.’ I asked to explain whom he meant, and he said to pass his message on to Jeebleh, to whom he wants to talk. I offered to give him the number of Jeebleh’s mobile, but he said that that was not what he wanted to do. He wanted Jeebleh to come here and to wait for his call on the landline.”

Bile turned to Jeebleh. “How long ago has it been since you got here?” He looked at his sister and waited.

“About an hour and a quarter.”

“Does this mean we’ll be here forever, waiting?”

Jeebleh suggested they wait as long as they could.

“I don’t like devious people,” Bile said.

“To hell with it all!” Shanta exploded, and hurried from the room, breathing like someone who needed a good, hearty cry, in private.

JEEBLEH AND BILE TALKED WHILE THEY WAITED FOR SHANTA TO RETURN, AND for the phone to ring.

“What becomes of a nation when there is such a great disharmony that everyone is dysfunctional?” Jeebleh said.

“The young ones will play truant,” Bile replied, “the civil servants won’t do their jobs properly, the teachers won’t teach, the police, the army, the entire civil service, nothing, and I mean no institution, will function as it should.”

“In short, you’ll have a dysfunctional nation?”

“It’s only when there’s harmony within the smaller unit that the larger community finds comfort in the idea of the nation. The family unit acts as a counterbalance to the idea of the nation. And in order for the nation to function as one, the smaller unit must resonate with the larger one.”

Jeebleh, silent, pondered this.

Bile said, “You asked if sex was the subtext of Shanta and Faahiye’s ruined relationship? Or did you ask if sex was the fault line in their marriage? I recall being embarrassed by the question, and have since thought it over. I think that one never casts aspersions on a wife, a husband, or for that matter an intimate, without self-diminishment! This is a lesson we’ve learned the hard way, from the civil war.”

The landline rang, and Jeebleh answered.

IT WAS AFTER NIGHTFALL WHEN JEEBLEH AND BILE LEFT SHANTA’S. THE DARK sky spread above them, the ten-day-old moon a reference point. Jeebleh was relieved that Faahiye had kept his word and called; he had promised to call again, probably the next day, to arrange a face-to-face meeting with him, alone. But he hadn’t said anything about Raasta, and he kept repeating, “We’ll meet and talk!” Bile had stood close by during the conversation, his imperious demeanor sufficient to remind Jeebleh not to do or say anything that might complicate an already complicated situation.

But something about the call had made Jeebleh’s heart stop, though he didn’t speak about it afterward. When he had finished talking with Faahiye, Af-Laawe had come on the line. He said that he would meet Jeebleh the following morning at a crossroads south of Bile’s apartment. He told Jeebleh that he would bring his mother’s housekeeper along, and the three of them would go together to the cemetery where the old woman was buried.

As they walked back to Bile’s apartment, Jeebleh trembled like a candle caught in a storm. He had reached at least three certainties: Af-Laawe was more involved in these nefarious activities than he had let on. And if the two of them met, and the girls were released unharmed, Jeebleh would put his own plan into motion, with help from Dajaal. And at possible risk to his own life, he would not divulge the proposed encounter with Af-Laawe to anyone, not even Bile or Seamus. Maybe to Dajaal, but he would have to think about that. As he walked, he sometimes felt he was about to collapse at the knees, or his legs were about to take a tumble; he would then straighten his back, steady his body, and stride forward. Bile would extend a helping hand, asking if he could do something for his friend. Shanta’s accusation — that he had secretly been talking to Faahiye — resounded regrettably in Jeebleh’s ears. He wished that he had spoken of the rendezvous that Af-Laawe wanted, shared it with Bile there and then, as soon as he had hung up. Now Jeebleh would have to keep the appointment secret, and honor it, at great cost to his own standing if he was discovered. He was damned either way, whether he spoke of it or not.

When Seamus let them into the apartment, he noticed Jeebleh’s pallor. “Oh dear, dear, you’re a wreck, aren’t you?”

And even though he wouldn’t hear of either friend’s helping him to his room, Jeebleh accepted a bowl of broth and a cup of hot chocolate, in bed, when they were offered.

23

JEEBLEH WOKE UP FEELING ASHAMED AT HIS INABILITY TO MENTION HIS appointment with Af-Laawe to Bile or Seamus. He got in touch with Dajaal, however, calling him on his mobile to inform him that he had arranged to meet Af-Laawe and go to the cemetery.

Bile had now gone to work, and Jeebleh needed someone to talk to. He woke Seamus, and over a breakfast of Spanish omelette with him, Jeebleh was physically unsteady. He felt as though he had been emptied of life itself, like an egg out of which a weasel has sucked everything.

Seamus had sensed Jeebleh’s unease from where he sat across the table. “If I were you,” he said, “I would be careful before committing myself to an action that might complicate matters for all concerned.”

“I look nervous, do I?”

“You look like a teenager right before his first date,” Seamus said. “Anyway, whatever you’re up to, please don’t embark on a job if you aren’t prepared to follow it through. Besides, you must steel yourself for an unexpected challenge if you’re up against a no-goodnik of the local variety. I’ll offer any assistance you require.”

Jeebleh thanked him and pushed away the omelette, which was cold as a morgue. His innards stirred with the adrenaline of a daddy longlegs crawling out of a ditch a meter deep. Saying no more, he went to keep his appointment with Af-Laawe.

FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS, JEEBLEH TURNED LEFT WHEN HE WAS OUT OF THE building, then right and right again, looking this way and that to see whether he was being tailed. He waited at the designated corner where he was to be picked up. He was like a child playing at being an adult. He did not like what he had been reduced to, a marked victim. After all, Af-Laawe and his cohorts could do away with him if they so chose.

He had just decided to cancel the appointment, and was pulling out the mobile phone to call it off, when he heard and then saw a black stretch limousine approaching. He had been listening for the bumpy clamor of Af-Laawe’s jalopy; this was totally unexpected. Or was it? Had he not been told about a fancy car seen in the neighborhood of The Refuge on the day the girls went missing? His ears beat with the rhythm of a funeral drum.

For a moment he thought he was mistaken, because the black Mercedes cruised past him, raising a storm of dust. But then it turned and came toward him again, as fast as a getaway car leaving the scene of a crime. The driver cut the speed, until the car was as slow as a hearse, and came to a halt. The back window opened, and there was Af-Laawe, sitting showily in the row of seats by himself. All smiles, his index finger bent and beckoning. “Get in!” he said.

Jeebleh took his time, and had a glimpse of two toughs, one at the wheel, the other in the second row of seats.

Af-Laawe cried, “Hold tight!” and the car was off in a rattle of gravel.

Not wanting to show that he was frightened, Jeebleh held tight, as he had been instructed. Af-Laawe was visibly agitated, and Jeebleh wished he knew what had excited him so. He prayed to God they wouldn’t have an accident: the hospitals were barely functioning, and what if he needed a transfusion? Was the blood supply safe? If Shanta’s so-called cartel was truly in operation, his heart and kidneys might end up somewhere in the Middle East! And this pimpmobile was a clear sign, if he needed one, that Af-Laawe was not to be trusted. Disjointed words fell pell-mell from Af-Laawe’s mouth.

“Where are you taking me?” Jeebleh asked.

“To your mother’s housekeeper!”

AND BEFORE JEEBLEH KNEW IT, THEY WERE THERE, AND A WOMAN WHOM Af-Laawe introduced as the housekeeper was hugging him and kissing his cheeks, then his right shoulder, then his hands one at a time. Jeebleh was overwhelmed with emotion, although he and the woman had never met. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember the name by which he had known her. He was of two minds whether she was genuine or fake, for he couldn’t be certain whether the name by which she was now introduced matched the one he had sent monthly xawaala remittances to.

To the best of his memory, he had had no hand in hiring her, and he couldn’t recall who had. He remembered agreeing to transfer the funds through an agency based in New Jersey to an account in the woman’s name at a Mogadiscio bank. He had received a letter from his mother, written with the help of a scribe, informing him of the woman’s employment. In addition, he had been given a neighbor’s telephone number for her. His mother would not countenance a telephone in the house, for in those days, phones were a nuisance: if you were one of the few subscribers in a neighborhood, your phone would quickly become community property. He felt guilty that he hadn’t been there for his mother, yet he had done what he could, and he tried to have her join him in America. But there was a problem, something to do with her not having a passport; the authorities — read Caloosha — would not issue her one.

Jeebleh and the woman now sat on a threadbare couch on the porch of a small house with a very low ceiling. Af-Laawe stood apart, his back to them, intently watching the road while he eavesdropped on their every word. The two muscles standing guard at the door made a dramatic impression on the woman. Whereas Jeebleh spoke to the woman in a low voice, she made a point of talking to him loudly, so everyone could hear. Although he assured her that he wasn’t hard of hearing, she continued to talk as if to a deaf person.

This was no routine encounter for Jeebleh: he was meeting someone who claimed to have looked after his mother’s daily physical needs, nursing her through advanced age until her death. If she was genuine, he might have looked upon her as a mother to his mother. But he sensed that he was being duped, so he was not in awe of her or of what she might tell him. He had an unpleasant question about letters that had been returned to him unopened. He meant to ask why they had been sent back, not about the monthly remittances. But a drought raised its parched head inside him, and he could come up only with an innocuous question: “What were my mother’s last words?”

“She was happy to go, when her time was up.”

“What else do you remember?”

“I remember the shine on your mother’s cheeks.”

“Her last words?”

“She was happy to go, when her time was up,” the woman repeated, with more care this time, and added: “But she was very sorry that you, her only beloved son, weren’t there to bid her good-bye.”

They lived in a world of pretense, the two of them. He talked with caution, well aware that his life depended on it. She spoke to please Af-Laawe; most definitely she feared him too. But Jeebleh had to set a test for her, to see if she was for real.

“Like many Somali children,” Jeebleh said, “I never knew my mother’s age precisely. Would you by any chance know?”

“She was close to seventy.”

“When she died?”

Af-Laawe stepped in. “If we had her papers we would be able to answer your question with more precision.”

His mother had had a strong and youthful spirit, and had been more together in mind and body than many others of her advanced age. Jeebleh knew that although she may have appeared younger, she was actually in her early eighties when a housekeeper was hired to look after her.

The woman, contradicting an earlier statement of hers, said, “She wanted so much for you to return before her final departure, and as I said earlier, she was sad that she had to go.”

He pictured her in his mind, a hardworking and determined woman, prepared to outlive the Dictator. She wouldn’t have been happy to go without seeing her son. In fact, on the few occasions when he had called on the neighbor’s line, she would tell him that she would preserve herself until he came home. Now that he remembered the phone calls, it struck him that this woman was not the person to whom he had spoken when he had telephoned: that woman had had a local accent, while the woman in front of him had a more pronounced accent from the north, probably from Galkacyo.

He had seldom written to his mother, and was cautious when he did. Not only did he think there was no good to be gained from raising her expectations, but he did not want to cause her unnecessary distress. She never sounded keen on the idea of having his wife and two daughters visit. “What will I say to them?” she asked once. “I don’t speak a foreign language, and you haven’t taught them Somali.” And when he spoke to her again, asking her to think further about it, she said, “It’ll only worry me to no end if they come. Besides, I won’t be able to sleep a wink, night or day, expecting a knock on my door, and waiting for someone from the National Security to harass us.” She was a woman with an agenda, the preservation of her son and Bile, whom she loved as though he were hers too.

Jeebleh asked the housekeeper to tell him what his mother thought about his unannounced departure from Somalia.

“I don’t like to hurt your feelings,” she replied.

“How do you mean?”

“Your mother died believing you were a traitor.”

He knew the woman wasn’t telling the truth, and was sure she had been told to say this. He shifted his gaze away, refusing to look in her direction for a while. When he had her in his sights again, he asked, “How often did Caloosha visit her?”

It was her turn this time to appear drained of blood, her face becoming pallid. “I don’t wish to get involved,” she said.

“What do you mean, you don’t wish to get involved?” He pretended to be enraged. “What has my question got to do with your getting involved? Involved in what?”

He knew and she knew where he intended to take her with his questions. And he understood why she didn’t want to go there with him, to a land of further attrition. Af-Laawe, he noticed, was agitated again. Jeebleh decided to interrogate her further. “Did my mother suffer any lapses of judgment?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I doubt that she would think of me as a traitor, unless she had suffered great lapses of judgment.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Did she die fully alert?”

He had been kept so ill informed about her state of health that he did not even know about the deterioration until she was just about dead. He had seen this as symptomatic of a country whose people cared little about one another. On the one hand, there was deliberate indifference to her condition on the part of the state apparatus, because she was his mother. On the other hand, there was an incurable apathy everywhere. Someone like Shanta, who had visited the old woman and in all probability looked after her now and then, still hadn’t stirred herself sufficiently to show that she cared, by writing to him.

He and his mother had never talked about his departure from Somalia: it would have been unwise to discuss his controversial one-way ticket out of the country on an open telephone line belonging to a neighbor. He had heard of his mother’s deteriorating health, and tried to telephone, but could not get through because of the bad connections. Then he received a newspaper clipping, anonymously posted, in which her death was announced. Now he repeated, “What was my mother’s mental state when she died?”

“Your mother died on her own terms,” she said.

“She was fully aware of what was happening?”

The woman nodded.

He imagined Caloosha calling on his mother, sitting at her bedside day in and day out, and describing her son as a traitor. Could she, in truth, have seen as a traitor someone who belonged outside the precincts of the human community? No. He knew she wouldn’t have thought of him as a Judas. Alas, he had no one to support his side of things. His voice as hard and unbending as iron, he asked, “What about my letters to her? Why were they returned, unopened and unread?”

“I’ve no idea about letters’ being returned.”

“You weren’t aware?”

“I read her the ones I received!”

“What did you do with them?”

“Burned them.”

“Why burn them?”

“Those were my instructions.”

“Who gave you those instructions?”

“She did!”

If this was true, then it could only mean that his mother had attained the bitter age when nothing hurtful could have touched her anymore. He had failed her, and was blaming others for his foibles: that was the sad truth of it. He had come too late. What in hell did he expect in a country weighed down with the grievances of its people, dwelling in a land burdened by destruction and death? His own letters returned, unread? Now he asked, “Were you alone with her when she died?”

“We weren’t alone.”

“Who else was there with you?”

“Caloosha!”

She would give no further details, and resorted to shaking her head back and forth, then up and down. She paused for a brief spell, then shook her head now to the right and now to the left, in the gesture of someone ridding herself of a terrible thought.

Jeebleh imagined his mother dying, and then total quiet descending, a butterfly no longer stirring, with its wings folded, still.

He heard Af-Laawe say, “Now to the cemetery!”

ON THEIR WAY THERE, JEEBLEH UNDERSTOOD THAT HIS MOTHER HAD DIED restless. It no longer mattered to him whether the woman now sitting behind him in the Mercedes, next to Af-Laawe, had served as her housekeeper or not; nor did it matter if she had lied to him. He and his mother hadn’t ultimately made peace with each other. His visit to her grave and his wish to build a headstone were but attempts to effect reconciliation with her spirit, which had departed in a troubled state.

He assumed that Af-Laawe and Caloosha would feed him half-truths and apparent facts. Having bothered to bring him all the way to the cemetery, they would probably show him a tomb marked with a board bearing his mother’s name. Thanks to Shanta, he knew what to look for: a Hinducini mango tree with seasonal fruits bigger than the head of a grown man, and four medium-to-large stones with his mother’s name on them. He sat between two men in shades, with guns.

“What about the money?” he asked the woman.

“We used every penny of it,” she told him.

He could only contemplate a life of regret, one in total ruins. If the woman was to be believed, the last words on his mother’s lips amounted to a curse. If he was being fed on half-truths, was it possible that even though the woman was as false as counterfeit money, the low-ceilinged house to which he had been taken really belonged to his mother’s housekeeper? And was this one reason why he hadn’t been allowed to go past the porch — because they were worried he might see many of his mother’s things, things the genuine housekeeper had appropriated or had been given by his mother? What gave this woman a certain credibility was that although she was a fake, she wore a dress his daughters had bought and sent as a gift to their grandmother.

Like it or not, he was visiting a land where demons never took a break. There was so much distrust that demons didn’t need to top things up, make sure there was enough to go round, give everyone his or her commensurate share of misery.

AT LONG LAST, THEY REACHED A GATE WITH A BROKEN SIGNBOARD, WITH THE words “The Sity’s General Cemetary” written in the shaky hand of a semiliterate. The road was choked with low shrubs, leaving only a narrow point of entry for the car. Traces of the old tarred road were visible, as was a broken-down shack, which once had served as a guardhouse. From the few times he had come here, Jeebleh remembered a caravan of vehicles waiting at the entrance. In those days, you had to present a death certificate from the municipality to be allowed to bury your dead here. Civil wars, anathema to bureaucracy, do away with the authority that is synonymous with normality. Civil wars simplify some matters and complicate others.

They drove for quite a while before the vehicle came to a stop at the command of the housekeeper, who saw the landmark she was looking for. The first to get out, Af-Laawe went around and gave the housekeeper a hand. Jeebleh got out and walked forward with a clubfooted gait. The huge loss was at last getting to him, weighing him down with more guilt. Had he been by himself, he would have sunk to his knees and stayed there, taking comfort from his humbled position. He heard his name spoken in a low whisper, and the housekeeper’s announcement: “There, I can see it!”

He took a good hold of himself and looked around. There was no mango tree with a sweet shade close by. Nor could he see four medium-to-large stones with writing on them to mark the grave, as Shanta had described. He didn’t know what Af-Laawe and the housekeeper expected him to do. He went on his knees, not because he wished to humble himself in prayer, but because walking or standing upright was proving difficult. Of course he knew that the moment toward which he had been moving all these years, to be face to face with revelatory death, was further away now than he had imagined. “This is not my mother’s grave,” he told the housekeeper.

“But it is,” she insisted.

“It isn’t!” he said.

Af-Laawe came nearer to find out what was happening, and the two musclemen with shades and guns approached as well. Jeebleh prepared for the moment when he would sink deeper into a reverie, and waited.

All the while, the woman pointed at a mound of earth that wasn’t his mother’s, saying, “There!” Who was she? Why was he still on his knees? From the way the woman indicated the mound, her forefinger extended, she might have been Columbus pointing at a new world beyond the horizon.

“That grave doesn’t belong to my mother,” he said.

Af-Laawe said, “Does a grave belong to the person in it, or to those claiming it with an authoritative apostrophe, as when someone says, ‘My mother’s grave’?”

Jeebleh wasn’t sure which Af-Laawe was getting wrong, his pronoun or where to place the apostrophe. Nor did he like Af-Laawe’s lip. But then what could he do about it, considering that there were two muscles who would kick him to death if he challenged him?

The woman came to him now, and towered above him. With her head inclined, her smile diffuse, she took his hand and led him to a mound that had collapsed on itself. And pointed at it. “Here she is!” She picked up a strip of zinc with his mother’s name recently inscribed in the hand of an autistic child. “Your mother’s here!” she said.

“My mother doesn’t belong in here!” he insisted.

With mouthy rudeness, Af-Laawe said, “She may not belong in the grave herself anymore, given her condition, but her bones do.”

One of the musclemen moved into Jeebleh’s field of vision, blocking it. He pretended to help Jeebleh to his feet, while his companion prodded Jeebleh sharply with the professional accuracy of a nurse giving an injection.

Jeebleh’s stomach turned, and he dropped deeper and deeper into nausea. He could not get up, and was so weak that he felt almost lifeless. By the time he managed to crawl closer to the mound and lay his head on it, the squeamishness had disabled his knees. Finally he fell, forehead first, as though he were dead.