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29

THE STORY OF HOW DAJAAL AND THE OTHERS HAD TRACKED JEEBLEH TO the house where he met the girls was a lot less complicated than the one about how the girls had been taken as captives. After supper, with Makka asleep in The Refuge, Raasta showed herself stronger than anyone had imagined. She was ready to speak of her ordeals. Even though he didn’t always follow what was being said, Seamus stuck around to listen, and was satisfied with the summaries he was given — but sorry that, in her trauma, Raasta had forgotten how to string together a sentence in English.

Her story disagreed with the version circulated earlier on one major point: the nature of the car in which they had been driven away. Raasta described it as a black four-door no fancier than Uncle Bile’s sedan. In it were four men wearing shades. When pushed into it from behind, she saw Makka lying on the floor in the back, not moving a muscle. The car traveled at frightening speed, a dilapidated battlewagon leading the way. When Raasta resisted, a muscular man held her down to stop her from screaming; he injected her with a hypodermic syringe with a clear solution, which knocked her out.

She came to later in the day, in a dark room draped with heavy curtains. The windows were boarded up, and the only light came from a naked bulb in the corridor. There were people in the house: a dozen men and women, talking all day long, sitting around on the carpeted floor of an adjacent room, chewing qaat and watching satellite TV, sometimes in Arabic, sometimes in languages that Raasta couldn’t identify. The girls slept on mattresses on a tiled floor, and felt the chill in their bones. The food was not bad, though.

Every now and then, they would be offered special treats: fruits flown in fresh from elsewhere, like apples and large white grapes of the kind not grown locally; cherry tomatoes, because Raasta loved them; lots of sweets, because Makka craved them; ninja toys, because both missed theirs. Only once, however, were they given fresh clothes — and this in the early days of their captivity. The treats coincided with occasional visits from the fat man. He never showed his face to them, but Raasta concluded that he was the head of the visiting entourage; he would waddle past their room, unfailingly surrounded by bodyguards. Would she recognize him if she saw him? She couldn’t identify him in a lineup, but she might recognize his voice, which, she said, dripped as if with undigested fat.

What of her father? When did she first set eyes on him, where, and with whom? She hadn’t seen her father until he was brought to them. He had seemed devastated, very frail, his eyes bloodshot, as though he had been crying. He had bumps on his forehead, probably from being hit. What did Faahiye say when they met? He wept and wept, sniffing and unable to say much, and he looked helpless. But he was less weepy on the second visit. Raasta had the impression that he had been brought to them blindfolded, because hanging loose around his neck was a mouth mask like the kind Uncle Bile used when attending to very sick patients.

At some point when Shanta was out of the room, probably in the bathroom having a good weep, Jeebleh asked if Raasta could tell them more about the woman upstairs. Raasta was puzzled, she didn’t understand the question. So Jeebleh asked if she knew why her father had remained in the house. She assumed that he wasn’t allowed to join them, but she couldn’t say more.

When her mother came back, Raasta took her by the hand and, bidding everyone good night, led her as a parent might lead a child, saying, “Let’s go to bed. No more worries, all will be well. You’ll see!” It was Raasta who decided that she and her mother would sleep in Bile’s room.

Before saying good night, Seamus told Jeebleh to let him know anything that might be decided on the matter at hand, adding, “Let’s brain the lot of them for doing what they’ve done to our Raasta!”

JEEBLEH NOW TOLD BILE THE STORY OF HOW DAJAAL HAD TAKEN IT UPON himself to give Qasiir the task of tailing him since their visit to his mother’s grave, and how Kaahin had organized a battlewagon and crew. He wasn’t sure whether Kaahin had changed sides on a permanent basis, but he understood from Dajaal that Kaahin was available to help in getting rid of the riffraff who ran Caloosha and Af-Laawe’s cartel.

Not that Jeebleh and Bile agreed or disagreed on what to do about Caloosha and Af-Laawe, yet their conversation pointed to their incompatibility of purpose, neither able to articulate their differences, and both afraid of confronting the uglier aspects of themselves that this reflected. Jeebleh was wound up, living a minute at a time, as he had after the youth was killed in his hotel room. Bile admitted to not knowing how to right a wrong that had brought misery to their lives; killing X or Y wouldn’t help in a significant way, or solve the country’s problems.

When Jeebleh asked whether he had heard from the lab technician, Bile would say only that Jeebleh should have tests done when he got back to the United States. Pressed further, he became evasive, and got up, ready to bid a hasty good night. Then he said, “Leave it all to me. I know what to do now.”

Jeebleh wasn’t certain about Bile’s meaning: Was he alluding to the lab tests, or to Caloosha, Af-Laawe, and the cartel?

An hour or so later, while Jeebleh was still awake and trying to figure out what was what, or who would do what, Raasta came into the living room. At first, he thought she was sleepwalking, because she rubbed her eyes and mumbled something about wanting to tell him her story. He offered her hot chocolate, then made it for her. She sat in a corner, and after he had brought his double espresso over, she made as if to talk, but she did not. Soon after, Bile, also in sleepwalking stupor, joined them, and Raasta got up and took her hot chocolate with her out of the room without saying anything.

ALONE, BILE AND JEEBLEH TALKED IN LOW VOICES, NOT WANTING TO DISTURB the others in the apartment.

Bile was surprisingly garrulous — maybe because of the hour, or because he felt he owed Jeebleh an apology for Raasta’s unexplained departure. “Until the end of my days,” he said. “I will continue to remember the day Raasta was born best!”

“Why is that?”

“I knew right away that she was one of a kind,” Bile said, “and I sensed her uniqueness in myself whenever I touched her, and in the others whenever they looked at her. There is something special about the sweetness of memory as I revisit the scene. I think of ants forming a line and having to share a few grains of sugar.”

Bile explained that for some time after Raasta’s birth, he made a point of gathering as much information as he could from other countries, and learned of other “special” children, born to societies torn apart by internal conflicts. Described in newspapers, magazines, and radio commentaries as “miracles,” these children revealed themselves in measured intervals, and in different areas where internecine wars were the order of the day. They were born to unsuspecting parents in Senegal, Kashmir, Tanzania, Somalia, Bosnia, Colombia, Peru, Palestine, and in the mountainous Kwanziris of Uganda, near that country’s border with Rwanda and Congo.

Bile looked like a proud parent praising his offspring. Jeebleh listened attentively as Bile described Raasta’s uniqueness and pointed out that, unlike the others, his niece had “secular” beginnings, and nothing to do with the religious fervor.

Jeebleh asked his friend to name another “miracle” child.

Bile narrowed his eyes to the size of ants and said, “I can name one such child, sure. A Tanzanian boy, Sherifu, said to have come out of his mother’s womb chanting, ‘There is no other god but Allah.’”

“Kind of a new messiah?”

“He’s been described by some Islamic scholars as an angel, and been welcomed with the pomp and ceremony given to a dignitary in a number of African countries, most notably in Senegal, where crowds have gathered to hear him chant the Koran. Three African heads of state have received him, including Gadhafi in Libya, Kabila in Congo, Idriss Deby in Chad. He’s also met the American Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. He’s carried around in a gold-leafed throne by crowds in a frenzy, chanting the names of Allah, and he recites the Koran. Women swoon and collapse, and men fight one another to get nearer to him.”

“Now, why do we need a Sherifu or a Raasta?”

“Because people are lost,” Bile said, “and they hope to find their way back to Allah or to peace of mind through an intermediary. In fact, Sherifu has been described as a divine instrument, because he could recite the Koran at the tender age of three. Raasta is seen as a symbol of peace because of what she represents for people down here. Moreover, the fact that Sherifu is proficient in a number of languages, even though he has never been to school — he speaks Arabic, French, and a handful of African languages spoken in countries where he has never been — is seen as miraculous.”

“What about Raasta?”

“Like Sherifu,” said Bile, “Raasta is exceptionally versatile and picks up languages very fast. What’s more, she gives shapes to the links between words and their meanings, and then fits them into chains of her own choosing.”

“Tell me more,” Jeebleh said.

“I recall the day Seamus asked her how she was doing, and she replied that she felt as frightened as a leaf on a tree, drawing itself in, afraid that someone passing by might cut it off. Another day, after one of her parents’ quarrels, she compared herself to a tooth rotting at the root, with no gum to hold it.”

Bile told of another occasion, when Raasta, not yet three, explained why she had chosen him as her surrogate parent. She did so, she said, because “Uncle and I are bound together with the clear thread of a spider’s web, visible only with the rays of sunlight in the background.”

Jeebleh asked, “Compared with Sherifu, who could recite verses as a toddler, what could Raasta do at a similar age?”

“Raasta, at two, could speak of the things she knew about when she was a mere fetus, and how she was in touch with things through her own baby-faint heartbeat. She developed fast in the womb of her mother’s imagining, she would say, and was fully grown by the time she came into the world.”

Jeebleh remembered Bile talking at length about the day Raasta was born, and how his arrival had complicated matters for all concerned. “Would you say Raasta is aware of her own special qualities?” he asked.

“Raasta remembers watching her mother behaving awkwardly, throwing her hands up in despair, remembers hearing her say terrible things about Faahiye, and her parents quarreling fiercely, in private and public. She says that her parents behave as though they have no idea that every birth howls with its own need and is burdened with the histories of its antecedents.”

Jeebleh wished he could’ve seen the young thing, born with a head of raven-black locks. He thought of how full of stir and gorgeous she was, how calming to hold. He imagined her cry like the cawing of an excited crow. “And she asks rhetorical questions, doesn’t she?” he said.

“She wants to know if a tree rotten to the core can bear a healthy fruit worth picking.”

“People have described her as the Protected One. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know whether she herself is protected,” Bile said. “I’ve never actually seen her in imminent danger. But I’ve never seen her harmed either. I know that people believe that anyone in her proximity is safe from the harms of the civil war.”

“Hence a miracle child?”

“She is seen as a symbol of peace, that’s right.”

30

JEEBLEH WOKE AFTER A BRIEF SLEEP TO THE SOFT SOUND OF A CHILD’S FEET pattering back and forth in the room. He was a lot groggier than was good for him, and he fought hard not to make much of his state of exhaustion or confusion. Clumsily rubbing his eyes, and then becoming conscious of the unfinished business of his uncut hair, he willed his expression to change instantly to one of delight at the sight of Raasta standing over him.

He scrambled out of bed, and then apologized. Perhaps he would have preferred it if she had not come upon him sleeping, or tired. Already dressed and ready to face the day, she was elegant in her composure, waiting. There was something noble in how she held herself, as though ready for an event of extraordinary nature.

Here was the rub: For one so young, she had a face as ancient as the roots of a baobab, and yet young-looking, a joy to gaze at and adore. He reckoned she was in her public mood, and it was time he prepared himself for what she had to say. He cleared his throat, took a solid grip of himself in good time, and said, “How are things with the world this morning?”

“Dajaal wants to talk to you,” she said, and seeing that he looked so bedraggled, she smiled to herself.

At the mention of Dajaal’s name, several of the latent worries he had lived with for the last few days came out. Had death, which kept a close watch on his movements, paid a visit to someone, and if so, on whom had death called? “Where is he?” he asked.

Jeebleh caught sight of her as she withdrew into her private world, where she behaved like the child she was. But for these occasional slips, Jeebleh thought Raasta could offer the best tutorials in their art to the most professional of actors. She completely inhabited the role she had been assigned to play. She stood still, like a ballerina awaiting her music. “He said that you should meet him at the clinic,” she replied, “and from there he’ll take you and the builder to the cemetery.”

He could tell from her delivery that there was a second, more serious part of the message, and he waited, relieved that this time she didn’t appear to be lapsing into a kid’s universe. “Anything you haven’t told me yet?”

She turned nimbly away from him. Was she about to explode with the intensity of the part of the message she hadn’t yet delivered? His wandering mind took him back to his childhood, and to an Arabian folktale about a man who is about to be murdered: The victim asks his murderer to promise that after his death, he will visit his village, and recite to his orphaned children half a stanza of a poem he has written. The children understand their father’s coded message, and the murderer is apprehended.

Raasta looked up, his question perhaps resonating in her head, as taunts do. She said, in words carefully and properly enunciated, “Dajaal said to tell you that what needed to be done has been done.”

Even though Jeebleh understood what the words meant, he didn’t know precisely what had been done to whom. He was in no doubt, however, that Dajaal had packed a lot into the briefest of messages, which was why the two of them would have to meet and talk before he knew with any certainty what had happened. He was sure of one thing, though: The news wasn’t the kind you shared with a child so nervous as to unbuckle her sandals and dig the toes of one foot into the heel of the other. Solicitous, he wondered aloud if Raasta was okay. When she nodded, he said, “You’ve delivered a very important message, and I thank you very much,” in a tone that suggested that he wanted to get on with the rest of the day.

“Would you like me to take you to the clinic, where Uncle Bile and Uncle Seamus are, and where you are also to meet Dajaal?” she said.

“I would,” he said, “after a shower. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

Good as his word, he was quick about his shower, and he managed to shave, and trim the uncut side of his hair. When he emerged from the bathroom, she looked up at him and smiled, but said nothing. She led him to the clinic, without speaking, using shortcuts, her hand forever in his.

STILL HOLDING HANDS, JEEBLEH AND RAASTA WALKED IN ON BILE IN HIS consultation cubicle. They might have been lovers out on a promenade. And not having bothered to knock on the door, they gave poor Bile a startle when he saw them. Jeebleh wondered why he appeared so disturbed when seen taking pills similar to those he had taken the previous night. What were the tablets for? Were they for his depressions, or other complaints?

Bile stared at Jeebleh, then at Raasta, but didn’t say anything. His hand went to his mouth, covering it, then eventually to his chest, as though checking whether his heart was where he presumed it to be, and functioning. He was clearly at a loss for words. Sighing and still looking dumbfounded, he sat down, his face pallid, his body drained of life.

Raasta looked from Bile to Jeebleh, bewildered. But she too could not express her confusion, again because the words failed her. Her face said that she knew something terrible had happened, but she had no idea what. She seemed to sense too that the disquiet, earlier on Jeebleh’s part and now on Bile’s, differed from the uneasiness her parents were in the habit of driving each other into when they argued. This was a much more serious matter, and she had better not make inappropriate remarks, or ask infantile questions.

Bile beckoned to her to come closer. He held her at arm’s length, as though having a good look at her for the first time in years, then took her into his tight embrace, nearly hurting her. Jeebleh, not one to be left out, joined them in the hug — Raasta weepy, Bile almost ready to speak but still unable, and Jeebleh undecided.

Jeebleh stepped away from them, his thoughts drifting toward culpability, wondering what it was that had upset Bile. He leaned against a wall, listening sadly to Bile’s softly murmured words to Raasta, who was sniffling. Jeebleh became aware of the presence of a fourth person in the cubicle, a young girl. On impulse, he spoke to the sick child, whose chest was bare; her ribs protruded, her jaw was prominent, and her eyes were marked with unwashed sleep. “What’s your name, young lady?” he said.

Bile shook his head, moving it back and forth as a worshipful Sufi might. Raasta, no longer weeping, wiped her face dry with the back of her hand. She took notice of the sick child and did what she could to make her happy: she held the bony fingers in her hand, and kissed them one at a time. She continued kissing them until she brought a smile to the child’s lips, and that was heartening to watch.

Slowly the mood in the cubicle changed, and the space, with its fluorescent tube and humming generator, felt bigger and brighter. To Jeebleh, it was wonderful to see a smile gradually forming on Bile’s lips. The distant look in his friend’s eyes worried him, but there was no mileage in putting too many questions to Bile all at once, because the dark mood might descend again. It was possible that the years spent in isolation had, with this recent upheaval, begun to impose a mental imbalance on Bile, heavy depression descending on him with the cautious approach of an owl in a lighted compound.

Unable to stand the thought of seeing his friend in such a state, he prepared to leave the cubicle, to go in search of Dajaal or Shanta, hopeful that one of them might know what had caused Bile’s discomfiture. He closed the door as gently as one would the door to a room in which a child is sick, and an image etched itself on his mind: three heads dipped together, like three colts drinking side by side from the same ditch.

RAASTA TALKED UNCLE BILE THROUGH HIS DELIRIUM GENTLY. SHE KISSED him on the forehead just as it darkened with the pain trespassing there. She spoke to him as a mother might talk to a child unwilling to eat his meal. She had done so before, helped him through the worst panic attacks, helped him live out his hell in the quiet, and emerge from it, with little or no memory of what he had been through; he was capable of taking refuge in amnesia. His eyes were foggy, his mind in a mist of its own making, his thinking dogged by the formidable double-take of someone suffering the effects of guilt. He kept repeating, “Look at what they’ve made me do!”

AFTER A WHILE, BILE RID HIMSELF OF THE DEMONS, AND HIS HANDS GREW AS steady as a doctor’s again. Raasta was ready to ask him about the sick girl, who tried to get up on her feet but couldn’t stand upright; her knees wobbled, then buckled. Bile asked Raasta if she could guess the girl’s age.

Before she had time to think, Makka joined them. She held one of the sick girl’s fingers, which she touched to her own lips, and placed her head on the girl’s frail chest in a one-sided cuddle. The sick girl took Raasta’s finger — not Makka’s — and stared up at her, the pupils of her eyes not dark, almost pale.

Raasta guessed, “Five?”

“Not five,” Bile said. He sounded his usual self, congenial, convivial. At least his voice was normal, if not his posture; he leaned to one side, like a house about to collapse.

When Raasta looked at the girl again, she saw her face in a new way, and it was the face of a much older person, with no muscles, wasted. Her loose, wrinkled skin came away with your fingers if you pulled. And her belly was swollen. Raasta couldn’t recall the word Uncle had used to describe what was the matter with the girl, a big word, which sounded to her like some Italian ice cream, or a Chinese takeout meal. And what eyes she had — very large, the size of healthy onions grown in fertile land, which made you cry a lot if you cut them. The girl’s eyes were the most active part of her body, forever moving, aware, and alert to any changes around her. Except for that of her eyes, every bodily movement exhausted her, it seemed, and made her short of breath.

Raasta, Bile, and Makka stood in silence, in a circle. Raasta saw tears in the corners of Uncle’s eyes. This undermined her self-confidence: she thought she had dealt with his unease and talked him through it, released him from his troubles. She was used to her mother’s dashing out of rooms, into bathrooms or bedrooms, and crying tearfully. She might have believed Bile was weeping in sympathy with the ailing child, who hadn’t a future in the land of collective sorrow, but she knew that wasn’t true.

Suddenly the door to the cubicle opened: Seamus was there, not making the disarming entrance he often did, but remaining in the doorway, not moving. Raasta could not tell why he was staring at Uncle Bile, as fiercely as a parent might stare at a child misbehaving in public. Could it be that he was just studying Uncle? He was preparing to say something, but perhaps being polite, waiting for the right moment. His expression overflowed with such sympathy he looked as enticing as a full moon.

Shanta arrived and walked past Seamus into the cubicle, bringing with her a lot more unease than had been there earlier. The silences grew as long as evening shadows, and a hush unlike any other fell on the room. Raasta, desiring to calm the tension, moved to hug her mother.

“Uncle hasn’t been well!” Shanta’s words were reduced to a whine.

Raasta regarded Bile, who now looked fine to her, and thought to herself: But what on earth is Mother talking about?

She gave her mother a sweeter hug, which took in her sorrows, as one might draw up a skirt that’s too long. She talked to her mother, then to Makka, then to the sick girl, in an inclusive way. She beckoned everyone to join in a hug. But when she looked up to invite Uncle Bile and Uncle Seamus, they were not to be found, and she had no idea when or where they had gone. Restlessly, she pulled the sick child closer, as though going down a slide together, down and down until their hearts were in their mouths. Raasta was a little scared going down slides. Shanta rarely gave such all-inclusive hugs to anyone voluntarily.

Raasta now thought of a neater way of closing the brackets her mother had opened when she spoke of Uncle’s not having been well. “Uncle Bile looked fine to me,” she said. “Tell me, what do you think is the matter with him?”

“It’s a long story, my sweet!” said Shanta.

Raasta knew that she wouldn’t get to hear the story. But never mind, she thought, because on the whole she had had a wonderful life, compared with other children; she had had fun, and had been looked after by wonderful people, whom she adored. She knew it would be greedy of her to ask for more. After all, there was no joy in making demands that were impossible to meet. It wouldn’t do to ask Uncle Jeebleh to stay on in Mogadiscio, when he had a family in New York, and a job to go back to. She had met him face to face only yesterday, but she loved him dearly, because of his courage.

Raasta sensed that she had an attentive audience in her mother, Makka, and the sick girl, all three of them eagerly waiting. But since her return, she had been struggling to find her tongue. It was curious that words were avoiding her lately, as though she had betrayed or abused them; they no longer leapt joyously to her tongue as before, when she could speak effortlessly and make them do as she pleased. She looked around self-consciously and saw Shanta studying her with more care — perhaps wondering if the past ordeal had imposed silence on her.

It took a long time, a lot of patience, and a great many questions before mother and daughter passed words back and forth, and in the end resolved what Raasta meant to say. “I’ll never sit on his lap, ever, or hug him or kiss him.” And yes: she knew about the terrible things he had done to Uncle Bile and Uncle Jeebleh decades before, knew about the blood on his hands. There was so much blood he would not be able to wash it away, even if he prayed fifty times a day for the rest of his life.

But there was a hitch. Raasta could not bring herself to use the word “hate” to describe what she felt. The word would not come off her tongue, it just would not, even though for the first time in her young life she felt she hated someone — Caloosha, whom she would never call Uncle again, because he had been very wicked. She believed he was holding her daddy prisoner. And she was certain that he had ordered her abduction and that the job had been carried out by some of his friends. Although she had not seen his face, she suspected that she had heard his voice.

“You’re too young to hate!” Shanta told her.

“I know from what Uncle Bile has said”—Raasta spoke with unprecedented ease, not because she grew more articulate, but because she was quoting her favorite uncle—“that there are too many people fighting over matters of no great consequence.”

For a few moments, the words she ascribed to her uncle gave her as much joy as a new toy might offer another child. Her face beamed as she spoke in a tongue borrowed from her uncle, of how every time militiamen fight and kill, a new twist is given to the old fighting, which then takes on the shape of a new quarrel. And when there is the possibility of peace, a new fight erupts, based on an old complaint, and which some people call justice and others madness. “And,” she asked Shanta, “do you know what Uncle Bile said about civil war?”

“Tell me.”

“That in a civil war there is continuous fighting, based on grievances that are forever changing.”

31

JEEBLEH’S EYES, WHEN HE SAW THEM IN THE MIRROR WHILE SHAVING THE next day, were proof enough that Caloosha’s death did affect everyone in the close-knit family of choice in major ways, whether they admitted it or not. But how had the death of the monster been achieved? Dajaal? Had Kaahin and his associates, or Qasiir and his boys, lent a hand?

He was surprised to read in a report in one of the Mogadiscio rags, by its correspondent in the north of the city, that Caloosha had died in coitus, croaking on top of his young wife. Other tabloids had a field day too, one topping another in their scoops. A paper based in the south of the city, deemed to be more sober in its analysis and less vitriolic in its assessments, identified the wife as a young woman whom Caloosha had abducted a few years earlier, after killing her entire family. According to this article, he had kept her as his sex slave under lock and key in an upstairs apartment. She belonged to the Xamari community, and was her captor’s junior by at least forty years. Another paper, claiming a valuable inside source, reported that an unidentified woman had summoned Bile to the villa to help resuscitate his brother. He had gone there immediately, together with two other doctors. But their attempt at resuscitation was too late, and he was declared dead at the villa at about five in the morning. Yet another rag emblazoned its front page with the sensational headline “Blame It on Viagra!” Perhaps the editor was simply indulging in some cheap underhand joke at the expense of the dead man.

Jeebleh was surprised that no one expressed the least bit of sorrow at the death of a man whom they knew, and with whom a number of them had had dealings. At worst, he had expected some of those who’d benefited from their association with Caloosha to speak well of him. He wondered whether there would be any mourners at his funeral, or would he be buried alone, no one to attend but the gravediggers?

ON HEARING THAT CALOOSHA HAD DIED, SHANTA REACTED WITH UNBECOMING rage. She described him as a spoilsport.

Cursing, filled with the sappiness of her fury, she let the lava of her anger spill over, but made sure that it didn’t assume the solid form of hard evidence. When she began to cool, she complained: “What peeves me is that he isn’t letting me and Raasta enjoy our reunion in undisturbed peace.”

There was no evidence that Caloosha had committed suicide or that he had willed his own death, as far as Jeebleh could tell.

She raged on regardless. “He won’t grant us the pleasure of enjoying Raasta’s return, nor have we any idea what or who is keeping Faahiye from joining us. It’s Caloosha’s accursed intention to make us all look bad in everybody’s eyes.”

“And how does he do that?”

“I’m saying that even in his death, he is a snob,” she went on. “Look at it this way: The fellow is now spoiling the alla-bari party for your mother tomorrow afternoon. What will people say if we throw a party a day after his internment? And have we decided if we’re going to his burial, as tradition demands?”

“Are you?” asked Jeebleh.

“Are we?”

Silence took both of them by the throat. To complicate matters further, some unasked questions lay between them, on the low table in Bile’s living room: not-yet-composed questions now for Shanta, now for Jeebleh, like flies on the unwashed faces of malnourished children taking breathers after lavish compensatory feedings. One unasked question had to do with what Bile was up to, in the darkened room, with the door closed.

DAJAAL HAD MADE HIMSELF SCARCE AFTER THE VISIT HE HAD ALLEGEDLY PAID to Caloosha in Bile’s company. Jeebleh met him only once before he did his disappearing act. And he asked him pointed questions. Dajaal, in his circumspection, related the exchange between the two half brothers. Apparently, Caloosha had glibly told Bile that he would need more than bullets to kill him, that he wasn’t “of the killable kind.” He boasted that there were very many others like him around and that soon enough another “unkillable” would take his place, and things would remain as they had always been. He ended his declamation by assuring his half brother that the rot in the soul of the nation had set in, and that killing him off would do little to reverse the process.

BILE HAD TAKEN TO BED EARLY, IN THE QUIET WAY IN WHICH A MAN WITH IRON in his soul suddenly lapses into a dark mood. Jeebleh resolved not to disturb him, guessing that he couldn’t stay awake for sorrow. His friend was best left alone in his private world of desperation.

But then Jeebleh wasn’t sure he and Dajaal had understood each other as conspirators do. That Dajaal had not made detailed references to the alleged visit, and had chosen not to divulge much of what he’d witnessed — save the conversation between the brothers — owed much to his military background, his no-name, no-packdrill training. In the end, this served as his sleight of hand, further strengthening the efficacy of the conspiracy.

Bile was decidedly in a sad state. Yet there was comfort in the fact that he wasn’t alone in the darkened room. Raasta, sensing the seriousness of her uncle’s despair, had pitched her play space in a corner of the room, and invited Makka to join her.

AND WHERE WAS SEAMUS? HE WAS AT THE CEMETERY, HELPING THE MASON whom Jeebleh had commissioned to build his mother’s sepulcher, to a height no greater than the span between his thumb and his little finger, as Islamic tradition demanded. Seamus had gone there with Qasiir and his posse of armed youths, in a battlewagon lent through Kaahin’s good offices. Seamus had spent much of the morning in the apartment, drawing his women, every one of these looking as if she could have had a walk-on role in Fellini’s 8½, babies at the women’s singularly abundant breasts, the women’s features like the Madonna’s. He wasn’t due back until after the mason had finished the tomb. Seamus had to be there, offering any help he could, because the illiterate mason could not work from his sketches, which he found most intimidating.

Jeebleh now remembered the cutting remark Seamus had made in reaction to Shanta’s rage over her half brother’s death. Caloosha had owed “heavy debts in blood” to many people, Seamus had said, so it was natural for people to take vengeance on him now that he was dead. What an apt phrase — heavy debts in blood! Jeebleh wondered who might exact the heavy debts, and to what purpose? Would the same person or persons exact repayment of similar debts from Af-Laawe? What might his own contribution to the campaign be, his role in the business of overdue payment in blood? Would he serve as a mere catalyst? Or would he put the collection of debts into motion?

His mobile phone rang, and it was Seamus saying that Jeebleh should come to the cemetery at once, to approve the design and the construction of an enclosure with a patch of green, a kind of garden. They wanted him to see what they had done. To the question of how he would get there, Seamus responded, without the slightest hesitation, that he would send Qasiir and his friends along in a battlewagon, and they would escort him. Jeebleh couldn’t help noting sadly what their world was coming to: He and Seamus were rubbing shoulders with armed youths and accepting lifts in battlewagons! He was about to share his worries aloud, when Seamus asked how Bile was doing. Jeebleh replied that their friend was in his darkened room, in bed, lost to the world, and contemplating the ceiling.

“Alone?”

“Raasta and Makka are with him.”

“What bothers me,” Jeebleh added after a pause, “is that our friend is soreheaded, and as quiet as a physician retrieving a bullet from a patient’s skull. And he’s his own patient.”

The two agreed that a man in Bile’s state of mind couldn’t be left alone. Whereupon Seamus suggested that Qasiir take a detour on his way to the apartment and escort Shanta there.

AT THE CEMETERY, SEAMUS, THE MASON, AND TWO ASSISTANTS WERE AT work, mixing sand and cement, and laying a rudimentary foundation for the structure. Qasiir and his posse were enjoying the sweet shade of the mango tree, the battlewagon parked nearby. They spread a mat where they could sit, and chewed their qaat. Seamus wore a hat that from a distance resembled a horse’s oat bag but on close inspection proved to be a cloth cap, like what a Yoruba farmer might wear working in his fields. He and Jeebleh chatted while the mason and his assistants pegged away, chanting a work song and moving quickly and deliberately.

Jeebleh felt humbled at the thought of being in a position, at last, to mark his mother’s memory with a white stone. And it was thanks to Seamus, the pith and the pillar of their friendship. “What was it you needed help with, Seamus?” he asked.

“For starters, I’d like you to perform the office of placing the marble headstone in the ground yourself, with your own hands. Then I’d like to know if you approve of our building a small cupola into the structure.”

“A cupola?”

“A cupola supported by fake marble columns.”

“Too ostentatious,” Jeebleh said.

“Neither would your mother approve, you think?”

“Nor would orthodox Islam!”

Jeebleh was surprised that Seamus was so conversant with erecting a monument over a Muslim grave, and able to suggest an alternative: a domed tomb that wasn’t in the least ostentatious. Jeebleh now performed the office of putting in the headstone so that it faced the Sacred Mosque in the Holy City of Mecca.

Seamus appeared to be in a dither, and Jeebleh asked him what was the matter.

Seamus explained, “One, the builder and I couldn’t agree as to the exact direction the headstone should face, even though we were agreed that it should face Mecca. Two, I wanted him to accommodate within the structure both a recess for an oil lamp to be lit for seven days, beginning tomorrow, and a cavity in the top of the headstone, in which we might plant flowers. But he wouldn’t hear of either, because he has never seen a recess or a cavity built into a headstone except in the tomb of a saint.”

“So he says my mother isn’t a saint?”

“Not in so many words, but yes.”

In an uneasy silence, Jeebleh looked from Seamus to the mason, who was an ordinary kind of guy, and clearly had an unusual way of assigning sainthood. But Jeebleh had no problem with that. Touched, he turned to Seamus, saying, “You’re the real McCoy, aren’t you?”

“Not genuine enough, when it came to convincing a builder what is or isn’t permitted in Islam, the religion into which he was born, but of which he has little understanding, less than I do. What’s more, I rubbed him the wrong way when I told him that although I was born Irish and into the Christian faith, I was agnostic. We communicate only in pidgin Italian, which he could barely use to order a meal at an eatery in Turin.”

“I wonder if he knows about Geronimo Verroneo.”

“Remind me who he was.”

“The Venetian who some say designed the Taj Mahal.”

“But your mother is more worthy than the empress in whose memory it was built,” Seamus insisted.

Jeebleh, speaking Somali, instructed the mason to create a recess and a cavity in the headstone, as indicated in Seamus’s design. Perhaps it was not the language, but the emotion in his voice, or the simple fact that Jeebleh was the son of the deceased, but the man acquiesced and set to work. Moving to further heights of enthrallment, Jeebleh took Seamus in his arms in a kissand-tell-all embrace. The mason and his assistants looked at them aghast. Qasiir and his boys first booed, then applauded Jeebleh’s action.

Jeebleh released his friend and held him at a distance. “If you’re not the most priceless thing that has happened to me,” he said, “then I’m done for.”

Standing opposite Jeebleh in the brightness of noon, and at that moment looking like a clown without his makeup, Seamus said, “Allow me and my colleagues to get on with the business that’s brought us here, please!”

Jeebleh looked away, amused, and his eyes clapped on three cars being driven slowly in procession. One of the vehicles was the kind that dignitaries are chauffeured in, the others were ordinary sedans. He found himself reciting one of his favorite sentences from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and revising it in his head to make it serve his particular purposes. “I might just as well say that ‘I see what I hate’ is the same thing as ‘I hate what I see’!” he told Seamus.

Seamus imagined becoming as many-eyed as a peacock with designs on the object of his elusive desire, when he looked and saw what he too thought he hated — Caloosha. Never mind that he was dead or that this would be the last Seamus would see of him: his funeral cortege.

Now a jalopy came running ahead of the tail of dust following it. Qasiir and his friends stirred themselves into a more restless mood at the sight. With a dark mood clouding his forehead, Qasiir approached Jeebleh, prepared to receive his next instructions. But none was forthcoming.

“From the way the driver’s beating that heap,” Seamus said, “pushing it beyond its limits, you’d think he was late for his own funeral.”

“I wouldn’t wish to be early for mine either.” Jeebleh found it necessary to elaborate when Seamus looked at him inquiringly. He paraphrased for him the Somali proverb that the mother of a coward seldom mourns her son’s early death.

Jeebleh spoke in agitated whispers to Qasiir, suggesting that he and part of his posse drive to the site of Caloosha’s grave, and that a second, smaller group, headed by Qasiir’s deputy, remain behind. And what was Qasiir to do? He was to stay as low and as still as a dog tag lying where its owner had fallen. Qasiir went off in the battlewagon, excited like a hound scenting the closeness of its prey.

“Is this really what we want?” Seamus said.

“What do you think I’m doing?”

“Do you want a shoot-out?”

QASIIR CAME BACK SHORTLY, WEARING A NEW PAIR OF MIRRORED SHADES through which you couldn’t see his eyes but he could see yours. Jeebleh was amused at his own reflection in the shades, and concluded that he had changed a lot in the short time spent in the city of his birth. Not that he bothered to consider the nature of the changes, or if they were to be permanent. He tethered his serious side to the job at hand, requesting that Qasiir kindly remove the shades, then asking where he had gotten them.

Qasiir used a mix of voices — imitation Italian; Arabic, presumably learned from Egyptian films; and Xamari dialect — to answer. A muscular dude, he said, had been wearing the shades; he had acted Hercules-strong and macho. Just to prove the dude wrong, Qasiir had provoked him into a fight, then peeled the shades off his face, threatening to kill him for them if necessary. Jeebleh asked who “the dude” was.

“He had plenty of muscles, but he wasn’t strong.”

Jeebleh recalled being injected with the liquid solution by a man who met this description. At Jeebleh’s prompting, Qasiir explained that it was no use carrying a fancy gun if you were going to chicken out at the last minute, was there? “The dude’s gun was for show, and he didn’t deserve to keep it, so I took it away from him, to help him, you see. Now I have his fancy gun and his shades too.”

Jeebleh felt he was being taken to a territory outside his experience. Not only was Qasiir running rings around him, he, Jeebleh, was becoming more dependent on the young man. Yet he was no more out of kilter than a man walking with his shoelace untied. How much of a change had been wrought on him by living through these experiences? Did it mean — and this was very worrying to him — that Caloosha had won him over to his way of doing things, crudely and cruelly? Jeebleh asked Qasiir how many mourners were at the graveside, and if he could tell him who they were.

“Five or six, maximum.”

“Including the guy with the shades?”

“And two military types.”

“Who else?”

“Two women.”

“One of them his wife?”

“Go see for yourself,” Qasiir said.

He knew then he would want to see for himself!

After a pause, Qasiir said, “It was no big deal.”

“How do you mean?”

“Cool Caloosha no longer cool!”

“Was Af-Laawe there?”

Qasiir was probably being cheeky, or perhaps knew more than he was prepared to let on, because he said, “They’ll be burying him, all right!”

You could’ve beaten Jeebleh down with a single feather from a vulture, when he noticed several perched in the mango tree, restlessly surveying the extent of the cemetery. “Let’s go and see what’s what!” he told Qasiir.

Jeebleh took pride of place in the battlewagon, next to the driver, and acted as though he were the commander of a fighting unit. With the heavy gun mounted on the vehicle, they were mobile, fast, and deadly; he feared no one. It took the battlewagon a few minutes to cover the distance between his mother’s grave and where Caloosha’s was now being dug. It was a sad affair: two miserable-looking military types in dirty fatigues, their bodies unwashed, eyes sore from sleeplessness, their cheeks bulging from the qaat they kept chewing; two women, looking rather like whores paid to mourn; and the muscular man who had injected the solution into his thigh. Jeebleh didn’t give in to the temptation of letting Qasiir and his friends turn “the dude” into inedible mince, something they would gladly have done if he had asked them. Nor would he inquire what had become of Af-Laawe, the muscleman’s paymaster; he assumed that they had fallen out with each other, as all thieves do sooner or later. For all he cared, Af-Laawe might have died at the man’s hands.

From the way the gravediggers took their time, you would’ve thought they were performing a thankless task — as if they knew they wouldn’t be remunerated for their labor. And where was Caloosha’s corpse? Wrapped in a white sheet, it lay close by, still, the freshly dug earth accentuating its sorrowful state. Unburied, his corpse struck Jeebleh as being sequestered in the aloneness of a man whom even hell wouldn’t deign to receive.

Good breeding made Jeebleh say a few words for the martyred dead anyway. And before long, he got back into the battlewagon, ready to return to Seamus and the other labors. He planned ahead to the moment when the sepulcher would be finished, and he would call on Shanta, to prepare for the alla-bari party. He wanted to arrange the purchase of the cow to be slaughtered at the next day’s feast.

ONCE THE TOMB HAD BEEN COMPLETED TO HIS AND SEAMUS’S SATISFACTION, Jeebleh said he wanted to be alone there, to commune with his mother’s troubled spirit. He was not a religious man, nor given to saying his prayers or fasting. But he wished to appease her spirit in the best way he could, by consecrating the tomb with a prayer. He knelt down, and saying a brief prayer, imagined two dark angels with blue eyes ceremoniously arriving to interrogate his mother, newly reburied. Sadly, the old woman was unable to provide the right answers to the angels. They were about to order the ground to close in upon her, when she recovered in time to recite the appropriate responses. Whereupon her grave expanded to seventy times seventy paces in length and seventy times seventy in breadth, and the light in the tomb came on. Approving of her, the angels spoke in unison: “Sleep in peace, then, with Allah’s blessing!”

Jeebleh joined the others, and the battlewagon took them back to Bile’s apartment. He was more pleased with himself and more relaxed than he had felt for a long time. But there was no Shanta in the apartment. Instead, he was pleasantly startled to find Faahiye in the living room. Where were Raasta and Makka? They were in Bile’s room, asleep, where Bile was awake, staring at the ceiling.

MEANWHILE, FAAHIYE WAS PERFORMING A RELIGIOUS RITUAL. HE TUCKED HIS sleeves up past his elbows, washed his hands several times, flung the water with his right hand into his mouth, and rinsed his mouth three times. Then he snuffed the water into his nostrils, only to blow it out soon after by closing his nose with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and snorting. He washed his face three times, then his right hand and arm, and rubbed his wet right hand over the top of his head. He inserted the tips of his forefingers into his ears and turned them around and around, then passed his thumbs upward, behind his ears. He washed his neck with the back of his fingers, and finally, washed his feet up to his ankles, pressing his fingers into the spaces between his toes, one space at a time.

Jeebleh and Seamus watched as Faahiye repeated the ritual of ablution again and again, never failing to recite the appropriate traditions.

“It’s as though he has fed his mind on an insane root, which has taken his reason prisoner,” Seamus whispered.

“As if a little water will clear him of the deed!”

Jeebleh left, intending to call at Shanta’s to make certain that everything was in order for the next day’s alla-bari feast.