Crossbones (23 page)

Jeebleh wakes up as exhausted as a wayfarer who has covered an immense distance to get here. His whole body aches, and his mind is weighed down with unidentified worries. He listens for sounds emanating from Malik’s side of the apartment but hears none.

He is enjoying a leisurely breakfast of toast and coffee when Malik emerges from his workroom, saying, “Coffee. That is what I need.”

Jeebleh says, “Good morning.”

“Morning,” Malik says.

“Sleep well?”

“I’ve slept little, but I’ve worked well.”

Malik—indicating that he wants Jeebleh to wait for a moment—walks away in haste and enters the bathroom, maybe to clean his teeth before coffee. Jeebleh says to his back, “You can always catch up on sleep.”

Malik is back before long. “Can I have some, please?” he asks, indicating the coffee.

Jeebleh replies, “With pleasure. And what else can I offer you?”

Malik says, “I agree that one can always catch up on sleep faster than one can catch up on writing when one has neglected it for some time.” He takes a sip of his coffee and, as if defining the extent of his haste and underscoring that he is in no mood to engage in a lengthy conversation, says, “You won’t mind if I leave you? I am itching to get on.”

Jeebleh says, “Brilliant.”

“It’s time I met a journalist or two, time I set up interviews with
people in the piracy business,” Malik says. “But I plan to rely less on Gumaad and more on either Qasiir or Dajaal. They are plenty well connected.”

“Good idea,” Jeebleh says.

And Malik is off.

Jeebleh packs his suitcase and puts half the cash he has left in an envelope, to do with it what he will before he takes his flight early tomorrow—most likely share it out between Dajaal and Qasiir, giving the larger portion to the older man. Then he sits in the living room and catches up on his reading. He has brought along half a dozen books from New York, and he hasn’t had the time to so much as look at them, much less read them. He will probably leave them behind; they could be useful to Malik for his research into the piracy question and the Somali civil war, viewed from the perspective of how the continued strife and the resultant impoverishment and desertification of the country may herald future conflicts in Africa and the Middle East.

But Jeebleh is restive and can’t concentrate. It is unlike him to make hasty conclusions about what he has discovered so far about the men from the Courts, but from his brief encounter with BigBeard and the little he has gotten to know about Gumaad, he can’t help concluding that they are an unhealthy procession of hardened, self-obsessed men who have been waiting in the wings for the opportunity to run the country their way. He worries whether Malik will fall victim to the particular cruelty Shabaab metes out to secular-leaning journalists.

He hangs up and dials Bile and Cambara’s number. She picks up the phone on the first ring. Listening to her, Jeebleh realizes that he has taken to her more than he has been aware. He finds her voice not only pleasant but reassuring, and he is delighted that his friend is receiving the attention and affection he needs.

He says to her, “I wonder if it is convenient for me to visit? Malik is working, and I don’t feel like reading.”

“Yes, please,” she says. “Do come. Anytime.”

“How is Bile doing?”

“In bed, reading and occasionally napping.”

“I’ll see you shortly, then.”

After he hangs up, Jeebleh telephones Dajaal to come fetch him.

After a light lunch with Cambara and Bile, Jeebleh is at the sink, washing up. Cambara is upstairs with Bile, who has packed it in, exhausted. Cambara has assured him she will come down once she has attended to Bile’s needs.

He reads the Arabic writing on the bottle of dishwashing liquid:
Imported from Australia, via the United Arab Emirates.
Jeebleh thinks that the term
globalization
is misleading, a word that hardly describes all that is happening in businesses, big and small, the world over. His forehead is crisscrossed with furrows as he revisits his dream. He recalls that when he awoke, his hair stood out like the roots of a baobab tree battered by a tempest. He didn’t tell his dream to Malik.

But his thoughts return to happiness for his friend. Granted, their current circumstances, within the prison of civil war that curtails freedom of movement, expression, and association, may not make for picture-book intimacy all the time. But they seem comfortable in each other’s company. That they could live in these circumstances without giving in to acrimony indicates the depth of their commitment to each other. He couldn’t care less if they occupy separate bedrooms, although he hopes that his friend, who spent so many years locked away and denied the opportunity to love, has had some opportunity to make up for lost time before the prison of sickness and old age closed in.

Just as he finishes putting the dishes back in the cupboards, Jeebleh hears Cambara coming down. He looks up and observes how the dust motes disperse in the sunlight at her approach, opening a way for her.

She asks him to make them espresso, and to retrieve a bottle of mineral water from the fridge. Jeebleh is pleased that she takes this sort of liberty with him; it makes him feel at home.

They sit at an angle, facing each other. Demurely dropping his gaze from her face, he notices that the front of his trousers is wet from standing against the sink. Cambara notices, too, and looks away, smiling, then bows her head slightly. She has had a shower and changed into a more casual caftan, and she seems revived; with her earrings in the clutch of her thumb and forefinger, she pauses and inserts them in her earlobes. Barefoot, she gives him the impression of a woman who intends to tiptoe through the remainder of the day, without a care in the world. He remembers how relaxed his wife used to seem after the children fell asleep. She takes a sip of her coffee and then unclasps her earring, after a bit of struggle, and removes it. She places the stud on her palm and takes a long look at it, then tosses it up, catches it, studies it again, and pockets it. She shifts in her seat, as if considering whether to unfasten the earring in her left ear, but seems to think better of it.

They talk at length about the early days of her return to Mogadiscio, when she had to get accustomed to the discomfort of a body tent, something she had never worn when she first lived there.

Jeebleh asks, “How does it feel, to be all covered up?”

“It makes me miss Toronto,” she says.

Jeebleh senses she is comfortable with the figure she cuts, sitting confidently as she does now, her heels tucked under her. His gaze journeys from her heels to the firmness of the rest of her body. He doesn’t want to know what Bile and she do for love, with Bile sick and
she his junior by twenty-something years. Maybe the two of them take a long view of the matter, as life partners do, secure in the knowledge that there will be tomorrow and the day after, the way he and his wife have been doing since her menopause. It is the luxury of old age to have both a long- and a short-term perspective on sex. Jeebleh has known couples of disparate ages who seem to struggle to find topics that interest both partners. Bile and Cambara never seem to have a shortage of things to say to each other. But will Cambara continue to stay by Bile’s side as his body weakens, as his health deteriorates? Himself, he has made a long investment in his rapport with his wife. They have a strong affinity, which will hold them together until their dying days.

“Are you still teaching?” Cambara asks.

He nods his head yes.

“Retirement not in sight?”

“Not yet,” he replies.

“And your wife?”

“My wife thinks we’ll be in each other’s way if I retire and stay at home, as she does—she took early retirement. This is also because we’ve recently moved. We bought a smaller apartment for just the two of us when our younger girl left home.”

“Retire and tour the world,” she says. “Why not?”

Jeebleh bites down hard on his lips to keep mum, as he considers the difficulties Cambara and Bile would confront if they were to attempt a world tour. Cambara, younger and healthy and carrying a Canadian passport, wouldn’t have a problem, but Bile wouldn’t get far.

He says, spacing his words, “Ours is a problem of a different nature from yours. Judith was born in Manhattan to Jewish parents from Lithuania. She thinks that New York is the center of the world; she can’t imagine why anyone wants to bother with the peripheries.”

“Isn’t it interesting that all the time I lived in Toronto,” Cambara says, “I never fancied myself as residing in one of the world’s centers? However, when I was younger and lived in Mogadiscio and knew no better, I thought of myself as residing in the center of the universe. How the world changes, and with it our perceptions of centers and peripheries!”

Jeebleh asks, “And what shape have your current perceptions taken now that you are back in Mogadiscio?”

“Every thought is centered here, on Bile.”

“Are you saying that nothing else matters?”

“I am saying that my world is here, where Bile and I are, a world on the periphery that has become a center for me,” she says.

“It’s amazing—how
we
accommodate the changes.”

She says, “I have been out of Mogadiscio only once since coming here, when I flew to Nairobi with Bile for his prostate operation. We had immense difficulties arranging for his visa into Kenya. I have no idea when or if I will return to Toronto. I can’t see myself living there alone.”

“You can’t imagine my joy at meeting you.”

“And I you.”

He can’t begin to imagine how she will respond to the thought that has just intruded upon his mind. He wonders if, in the midst of this easygoing conversation, this sudden question will encumber their rapport.

He asks, “What of your marriage prospects?”

He feels easy in his mind only after she laughs, his heart gladdening when she sighs and smiles. He is pleased to hear the jauntiness in her tone when she says, “You’re bull’s-eye direct for someone who is otherwise very refined in his manners.”

“I am worried about Bile.”

“How will marriage allay this?”

“It’ll get the religionists off both your backs.”

She says, “I doubt if marrying would achieve that goal. They lack goodwill. Why not think of me as a nurse caring for a convalescing man? They have outlawed contact between the sexes; soon they will forbid women driving. Where will all this end? Only male nurses for male patients? Female patients able to consult only female doctors? And this in a country short of female nurses to begin with, let alone female doctors?”

“How do they view it when Dajaal drives and you’re in the car, sitting beside him in the front, lightly veiled and talking with him?”

She replies, “I lied once when a young nitwit stopped us and asked if he was my husband. I said he was. You see, these religionists are happier being lied to than hearing the truth. They are a hopeless lot, the sods, and I suppose they find me provocative, against the grain. After all, I am not one of the hordes of ill-clad women they recruit to sweep the roads. I’ll say this about them: they know the type of women they prefer—the unlettered kind, who can’t stand up to them. That’s why they look to orphans and kids from broken homes to draft into Shabaab. They rely on the ill-informed and ill-supported to do their bidding.”

“I wonder, are the women volunteering to clear the roads exempt from putting on veils?” Jeebleh asks.

She replies, “It is a class thing. A woman at the wheel of her own car, who lives with a man not married to her and speaks her mind—that they find provocative.”

She falls silent now, and for the first time looks sad.

Jeebleh asks gently, “Where do you stand with Bile?” He waits until she is ready to answer.

“I love him.”

“Let’s call some people in,” he says.

“Who and what for?”

Jeebleh abandons himself to a flush of shyness. Then he says, “So that you and Bile are declared man and wife, in the presence of witnesses.”

He looks around, then at her, sighs heavily, sits back, closes his eyes, and rubs the bridge of his nose. Then he gazes at her, smiling. “God. I feel I am the one proposing.”